So, a certain birdie started this idea rattling around my head…
…how many of you would rather HEAR me rant than read it? I’m a recording nub, but I’m sure I could manage something. While it would not be as interesting as, say, an ex guildie’s drunken rambling about the birds and the bees (as we do acutally have recorded somewhere), I could probably get a chuckle or two.
Y/N?
GMail chats at work:
Kyrilean Silverblade: guild nate?
me: what?
Kyrilean Silverblade: ^
Amber: it’s his guild nate, too
me: oh, stfu
note
Kyrilean Silverblade: <3 u 2 sweetheart
me: you are such a twit
I should buy your wife a present for putting up with you
Kyrilean Silverblade: lmao
me: and breeding with you, even
Kyr spawn is scary
Kyrilean Silverblade: omg lol
This is what happens when you baby spice someone on a Sandbox Tiger, they dismount, and a normal sized person gets on…
Fucking DJ. Don’t listen to him, he’s so full of shit I made a new rank called Twilight Fan to demote him to. And yes, it was muted.
Apparently you can two disc priest heal ToC10 up until…oh…Anub.
Then it doesn’t work so well. :(
What the hell happened to our usual ToC10 lolfest?! Damn you, Kotakh! You and your dentist appointments! /shakefist
ETA: Anub basically went like this…
LOLOLOL STACKS OF POISON EVERYWHERE!
DEATH LOL!!!
….yeah. We made it to phase 3 once, and then failed because…well…I don’t know about the other two healers, but I was OOM. And I was sad, because normally we just roffle all over that place. QQ.
Warning: everything said in chat is subject to appearing in a screen shot.
Classy, Random Other Hunter. Really classy. Here’s what I say to you:
Die in a fucking fire, mmmkay?
You’re just jealous of the dinosaur, admit it. Everyone is jealous of Omnomnom. Except maybe the tanks, because they’re all, WTF that thing is huge are you really going to use that and I’m all, yes, yes I am.
By the way, those float after you break the floor. Unfortunately, jumping off of them apparently makes water hard as glass, killing you. Go figure…
See: first note.
…we’re just weird in the healing channel, okay?
I was sitting there innocently wasting time in Twitter instead of blogging or working on my Nano outline when lo, this post came to my attention. I read it over and immediately noticed a massive problem: he was always blaming the wrong people. I decided that it was my DUTY to set the record straight.
ETA: Don’t forget to check out other versions here and here.
Here, then, is a CORRECTED version of Mortigan’s list:
Amber’s Totally Fair and Unbiased Guide to Placing the Blame for Wipes
Cause of Wipe: The tank appears to be losing aggro left and right!
Person to Blame: The DPS
Possible Solutions: First, cuss at them a lot and remind them to LOOK AT OMEN. If they would just LOOK AT OMEN, then we wouldn’t have this problem. CLEARLY, any and all aggro issues lay at the feet of the DPS. I mean, they’re making it, right? Totally their problem. If that doesn’t work, take away the shamans weapons and make him DPS with mining picks.*
Cause of Wipe: The tank dies.
Person to Blame: The DPS
Possible Solutions: Clearly, the tank died because the DPS took too long to kill the boss and the healer went OOM.
Cause of Wipe: Boss immediately ignores tank and 1-shots the DPSers.
Person to Blame: DPS
Possible Solutions: Uh, DON’T STAND THERE, tardbuckets.
Cause of Wipe: The healer dies.
Person to Blame: The DPS
Possible Solutions: Misdirect onto the tanks correctly, hunters, or drop a frost trap! AoE the adds down quicker!
Cause of Wipe: The adds are killing everyone.
Person to Blame: The DPS
Possible Solutions: If you KILLED the adds then they couldn’t kill YOU. See also: previous wipe. Alternatively, if you weren’t standing in fires all the time, the healers would still have mana with which to heal your legitimate ailments.
Cause of Wipe: The DPS is too low, and the boss enrages.
Person to Blame: …the DPS!
Possible Solutions: MASH BUTTONS FASTER AND WITH LESS FAIL.
Cause of Wipe: People don’t know the fights.
Person to Blame: the DPS
Possible Solutions: Tanking and healing are very similar from fight to fight. CLEARLY, if the strats are being mucked up it’s the DPS’s fault, because they don’t know what the hell they’re doing! Go read strats, nubs!
*We honestly did this back in Kara.
There was actually a little discussion on Twitter about gender and in game roles and why we just don’t see that many women playing tanks. I’d rather not touch gender issues with even a 40 foot stick, but it’s an interesting observation none the less. Oh they’re out there, to be sure. And some of them are damned fine tanks. But there’s not many of them, and/or some of them hide very well. I can’t get onto Vent without wanting to yap, so no hiding for me.
Is it something to do with the pressure? Tanking pressure is different from healing pressure. Tanking, especially in a raiding situation, is more lime light-y. I mean there’s 5 other healers…and 2 other tanks. They are WATCHING you, man. WATCHING YOU. YES THIS FREAKS ME THE FUCK OUT AAAAH.
It amuses me to think that right this moment, in BoO, there are three women who play (healy!) priests who also have tanky paladin alts. For two of us, these alts were our mains at one point. What the hell is it with priests and paladins?
Speaking of alts healers like to have in common: Back in BC, we wanted a hunter for Kara, so we asked who had hunter alts to swap out. There were a few hunter alts, as it turned out-all of our healers had one. No one else, of course just…all of the healers. /facepalm
Anyway. Last night was supposed to be a Naxx25 badge/lolgear run…and we had…er…12 people? Maybe? There were no pugs in site. Naxx is officially a ghost town…deserted…the red headed step child of raiding instances, what have you. We dropped it down to a 10, though, and proceeded to lol our way through that. It was more amusing goofing off with 10 guildies than running many heroics with 5. :P That, and I got some more MT experience under my belt (though Loth is boring as ever) and made at least 2 pathetic shows as lolret. Let me tell you, having someone on Heigan who has never tanked it before…and a ret paladin who has never been melee down there before…results in a dead retadin. And a dead most everyone else, apparently. Oh, DDR boss, how we hate you! I managed to Not Fail Grobb, though. Er, well, not badly. Only Josh died… >.>
I did get JUST enough badges from it to replace my Naxx10 chest (!) with the badge one. That should help me out a lot! I should go pug VoA as a tank for more gear, but it scares me. I don’t know why, but…it does. Tanking in general scares me far more than healing or DPSing ever has. I’m so terrified of screwing up in front of everybody! O noes! And it’s hard to do a “guild” VoA run first to learn the fight…nope…gotta jump in there cold…ugh!
I am such a pansy. I do love tanking though. Of course I also love disc priesting, and shadow priesting, and BM huntering… I might love retadining if I didn’t SUCK at it. I can’t tolerate being bad. :( You know the kids who thought anything less than an A was a failure? That’s me. Being a disc priest is probably healthy for me. “Oh look, I’m at the bottom of the meters…WHERE I AM SUPPOSED TO BE” vs “OH GOD THE OTHER HOLY PALADINS ARE BEATING ME WHYYYYY”.
No, this post had no point. I’m all silly and rambly right now, and distracted by Nano. I think that, next week, I’ll start ToC Strats. Woooo, actual content!
Random thought: The funny thing about being a known kidder is that one rare occasions where I’m feeling especially bitter, sometimes the truth comes out and everyone laughs unknowingly.
Brief Tanky Ramblings
Normal ToC decided to like me and cough up my tanking trinket. Woo! …now to run it some more for the DPS trinket. Pffft. And then some more to get said trinket for ME, because Josh wants said trinket as well on his DK.
Thankfully I had enough defense to drop my Seal of the Pantheon for it, and keep the dodge trinket. I’m also now FINALLY over 30k health in 5 man buffs. Yay! Hopefully she’ll get some more goodies in the Naxx25 run tomorrow (that I’m leading? What? NO! *hands to Josh*). Then I can set her back into her primary alt slot and…
…work on my hunter? Alas, no. Jamethera is stuck as the bastard red headed stepchild of my alts. No, friends, I want to work on my shadow priesting some more.
PTR Changes
Stolen from Duct Tape and a Prayer because I can’t access the official crap:
/glee
Lookit! Lookit! Buffs! Tasty things! Oh my god! I’m so excited!
…granted I still do less DPS than most of our other shadow priests (HOW? MUST FIX) but YAY! Now we get to cross our fingers and hope these changes don’t get nerfed back into the ground by release time.
Also, I find it terribly ironic that spirit is well-nigh useless to me as a disc priest but…it appears that I want some as shadow. What? Damn you. blizzard, for complicating my two sets of gear!
Oasic, how do you beat me as shadow deeps? I MUST KNOW.
…oh they also made it possible for you to bubble nonraid/party members. Sweet! Thanks Blizz! Now I can run circles around Dalaran randomly bubbling people! YAY!*
*I may or may not be genuinely excited by this development.
I need a few items from normal ToC to help round out not only Ambrosine’s tanking set, but also her DPS set. Things like trinkets, which have hated me for years. You’d figure, as a tank, that I could find groups, yes? I mean everyone needs a tank, right?
Yeah, not so much. My fellow disc priest helped me for one run before she drew boyfriend aggro, and then after that I…couldn’t find another healer. There was enough DPS in LFG to choke a dragon, but heals were scarce.
“But Amber,” you say, “Doesn’t Josh have a holy paladin?”
Why yes he DOES! But see, he wanted to bring his DK, who wanted some of the same fucking gear I was after! I mean that totes makes sense, right?
“What about the other heals in the guild?! You have tons!”
Until I need them, sure.
I finally found a level 78 shaman who hadn’t played in awhile and we then proceeded to wipe on Paletress, twice. On normal. After that I pitched a small, angry “WHY ARE YOU ALL SELFISH PRICKS” tantrum and decided I was done for the day.
Really, people, I can play the “but I don’t need loot so I’m not going QQ” game, too. I directed a large part of my tantrum in Josh’s direction, because my guildies can be twits but surely my own boyfriend should be willing to get on his god damned paladin to help me fix my gear?
Yeah.
/sulks
/goes to play Champions Online
Did you know that healing people in CO will result in HALF THE ZONE TRYING TO EAT YOUR FACE? It does. Or maybe that’s just me-I have this bad habit of aggroing EVERY DAMN THING AROUND, even in WoW. I’m already becoming infamous for flying too low, then landing to 3/4 of the zone gnawing my squishy face. Oops.
By the way, you want to cure someone of keyboard turning? Make them fly in CO. You trying maneuvering with any finesse during full-speed flight with your keyboard. Yeah. It’s not happening.
I’m not sure what it says about me that I sat down in front of CO and said, okay, what can heal? I was really torn between Telepathy and Sorcery, and then I read the word pets and was so sold on Sorcery. I CAN SUMMON A WOLF AND HEAL, GUYS. FUCK YEAH. And I have wings. In fact, I accidentally created one of the most emo-looking characters ever just because I was like oh hey, I want wings and lets put some blue streaks in her hair! And then I thought the trench coat looked cool and…um…yeah. So fallen-angel emo.
I did a random name check on Azgalor today and I CAN RECLAIM MY PALADIN’S NAME.
SCREW YOU STUPID Y IN AMBROSYNE!
I did a lot of raiding this week-far more than normal. I don’t have a single 80 not saved to one or more raid instances, and I didn’t even touch Ony or VoA. Jamethera went to Ulduar 10 and Naxx25, Ambrosyne went to Ulduar 10, and Lyrandre made her second foray into ToC 10.
The ToC 10 was a guild run (sans one replacement for our DCing DPS warrior), albeit it an unofficial experiment before we head into it “for reals” later. We’d done one off night attempt there before but gotten stuck on Beasts. It resulted in lovely gems such as this one from one of our tanks:
We seemed likely to get stuck on it again, but after we replaced the aforementioned DCing Guy, we did alright. In fact, we cleared all the way up to the Twins. And you know what? Seeing the infamous Faction Champions for the first time, and post nerf at that I…I kind of enjoyed them.
Faction Champions: As Experienced by Lyrandre
/heal heal
/get aggro from the hunter pet
/fear
/heal heal
/get aggro from the hunter pet
/run in circles kiting the kitty and casting bubbles and dispels
/fear
/get aggro from the hunter pet and the DK
/panic and say GETITOFFGETITOFFGETITOFF
/run in circles kiting the kitty and casting bubbles and dispels
/fear
/get aggro from the hunter pet and the warrior
/panic and say GETITOFFGETITOFFGETITOFF
/run in circles kiting the kitty and casting bubbles and dispels
/fear
/wonder where the hunter pet is
/heal heal, dispel
/giggle and run into the middle of mobs and fearbomb
And that is how you Faction Champion as a disc priest. Since the sight of me running laps around the room with a cat following me was highly amusing, it was therefore an awesome fight. I admit to having an advantage, however: my tank is in the room with me to hear “GETITOFFGETITOFF” when vent is rather, ah, busy.
Come twins in ToC, however, we ran into issues. The tank kept dying. As the tank healer, this makes me QQ hard core. The only reason I can think of for this tank to die on my watch was the fact that I had to move around a lot. Let’s face it, I’m not an awesome mobile tank healer when my big spell is channeled and I’m primarily a crit/SP whore. Haste wut?
We were trying the one-tank, everyone-the-same-color strat. Which works in some respects, but without anyone of the other color around to sop up those orbs, I was doing a lot of orb dancing. Steve said that he would occasionally eat one for the sake of healing, which is fantastic, but two orbs will kill me. I don’t want to risk “eating” one orb only to have a second one sneak up on me before I’m healed. I think I need to drive home the “STEVE I CAN’T MOVE THAT MUCH AND TANK HEAL” aspect with a bat, because he’s got a wicked case of “If I don’t have a problem there is no problem” disease.
Guild hobbies: Picking on Huntres, calling Phaseroll a loot whore, healers plotting DPS deaths, picking on Lyrandre
Of course it doesn’t help that I make it easy to pick on me. Last week in Ulduar I just walked straight into a pack of mobs, for example.
My second trip into Ulduar with Ambrosyne as a tank was…not bad. I didn’t start to suck until Thorim, where I did Arena for the first time. Lots of DPS died in there. Mmhmm. I guess I wasn’t moving around to pick up mobs enough-a fact that Steve didn’t share with me until after. Thanks, Steve. You’re supposed to point out my dumb sooner so I can fix it if it isn’t clicking in my brain, mmkay? :P Since I spent so much time in the gauntlet (or staring at green bars) I admit I hadn’t actually watched tank behavior in the Arena before. Now I know!
She’s not a half bad alt tank if I do say so myself. She’s got some gear that needs replacing (just bought a badge belt!) but it’s a toss up between gearing her and the hunter. A lot of who runs what will of course depend on what’s needed, though I did also finally dual-spec Ambrosyne ret. She is wearing this lovely mix of epics and…greens, where I didn’t have DPS gear already.
I didn’t have much in the way of threat issues outside of the Arena, so no complaints there.
Dear Pugs:
I don’t want to see that sort of nonsense, okay? Okay.
And that’s that for my Monday Recap. I’ll leave you with this little gem, explaining why my ill-fated, dead-every-ten-seconds level 80 wolf is named HarryOtter.
