Insert vent session here.

Putting together a SiB raid is like one of those grid logic puzzles. Our two 10 mans have shrunk into one and a half, maybe, on a good day–which for summer is not surpising or even all that terrible.

Usually.

The…colorful personalities I have collected can cause issues, however.

• Player A will not raid with Player B.
• Player C would rather not raid with A.  B isn’t their favorite person either, but whatever.
• Player B has no idea what the fuck.
• Player D has a whole list of people they’d rather not raid with if given a chance but isn’t that strongly opinioned on the matter.  They’ll just bitch.  A lot.  In whispers.
• Player E doesn’t want to raid with A if they can help it, either.
• Player F would rather not raid with A…or G, H, or I.
• Player G likes everyone that most of the others tend to not like. (I’m glad someone does.)
• …etc.

…and that incompatible alphabet soup is why we did not have enough to raid last week.  Or rather, we technically would have had enough, if only everyone would Fucking Play Nice Together, but we can’t have nice things and it is what it is.  I love my guild as a whole, but individually?  Well…sometimes a GM just wants to choke a bitch.  But can’t, because she’s GM.  QQ.

And that is why I’ve been a cranky GM lately, because god damn it, children, I just want to fucking raid!  If I can’t have ALL of my favorite people at least SOME of my favorite people is better than NONE (I am totally player D, if you’re trying to guess). Mumble grumble.

>:|

Warpath

I’ve been on something of a warpath lately and I’m not sure why.  At least, I can’t nail down every reason neatly. 

And by “warpath” I mean “gone completely batshit in various peoples directions”.   It’s the little things that set me off right now.  Take, for example, tomorrow night’s sign ups.  Why do I have officers not signed up?  Why do I have someone in a position of import signed up on an alt despite my no-alt policy? Do you enjoy underminding my authority and making it look like I selectively enforce my rules? God you’re a silly git who hasn’t evn thought of it that way, I bet.  AMBER SMASH RAWR RAWR.

Ahem.  These are all problems that should be addressed face to face.  And they will be dragged out at the next officer meeting, I assure you.  But in the meantime I’m this tightly wound ball of Angry.  This is not a good time for me to be Angry at WoW, not when I’m weighing other real life passions and going “you know if I gave up WoW I could have more pony timez!!!!!” 

I don’t understand things like “well I don’t need anything on this character” as a reason to not attend raids.  Reasons like that just DON’T EXIST for me.  Back in Vanilla WoW, AQ40 held nothing for my paladin.  Nothing.  Not a single item, not when we started the instance and not when we cleared through C’thun trash.    But I attended every single god damned raid becuase you know what?  Other people wanted stuff from there and I enjoyed raiding with my guild.  That is the sort of mindset I have: I raid for fun, and to play with friends.  That is the standard I hold everyone else to, as well.

The more the gold gilt rubs off some players and I see what lies beneath, the unhappier I get.  I’ve gone from having a 25 man guild making some solid headway, to a 10 man guild who can’t get their second, supposedly primary, ICC10 together.  Because people would rather play their alts, no matter how badly we need their mains.   Becuase well if we’re not doing 25s they don’t care (nevermind that canceling the 10 makes it almost impossible to retain the recruits needed for 25s).  Because they don’t want join a partially ocmpleted run and miss out on frost badges on an alt.  Becuase they’re not all exactly like me in thier motivations and I apparently can’t wrap my head around that thought right now.

I think I need to step back, go hug a pony, and try to find my sanity again.  I’d take a break from raiding as well, but then what if raids get canceled becuase I’m not there and then I’m as bad as they are and OMG!!!!1!!eleventy!!!1

…excuse me I’ll be over here trying to stuff chocolate into my mouth so that I at least can’t say anything else overly stupid.

Sometimes GMing Is Like…

Sometimes I’m reminded of my high school creative writing class.  I tend to write in a fairly straight forward fashion, even when it comes to poetry.  I had come to disdain the over-use of metaphors back when we’d read been tortured by A Farewell to Arms.  As far as I’m concerned, Hemmingway can go die.  In the rain.

She’d read the peice and then hand it back to me, full of excited commentary about my use of metaphor and symbolism.  I’d tilt my head and wonder what on earth she was smoking while she graded papers, becuase fuck if I’d intended any of the stuff she read into my work.

Sometimes, GMing gives me the same feeling.

RAWR.

I wanted to be working on my story today, or on an April Fool’s post, but you know what?  I spent the entire morning fixing FUCKING DKP!  And making official posts so people will stop asking me about OMG THE SARONITE IN THE BANK CAN I HAS?!?!

YES YOU CAN HAS.

YOU CAN HAS THE GUILD, IN FACT.

I have a standing offer in another guild where I am BM hunter my heart out!

To hell with you and your Twitters and IMs and emails and OMG AMBER FIX NAO stuff.  >:|

Red Gems Are Manufactured With Crack

Dear Blizzard,

My disc priest?  Wants red gems. 
My hunter also wants red gems.
In fact, a lot of people want red gems.  Tasty, tasty red gems with straight (insert crucial stat here).  Things like spell power, agility, strength, and attack power are very important to multiple classes.  So why couldn’t you PUT THOSE STATS ON OTHER COLORS SO THAT RED GEMS AREN’T ALWAYS HUNDREDS AND HUNDREDS OF GOLDS?

Just a thought.

I mean, why can’t a straight strength gem be…yellow?  Or something?  There’s always one color gem that’s cheaper than the rest, shift something to THAT color so that we can, I don’t know, spread the pain?

No love,
The consumer of 200g gems that everyone else fucking wants too which is why they are never in the gbank omg

Rage, Real and Feigned

A lot of my infamous rage on this blog is, if not feigned, at least greatly exaggerated.  Rants are funny, I like being funny, so what could be better than funny rants?

Underneath the faux rage is, however, a very real build up of genuine anger.  I’m frustrated with some attitudes, and some people.  And some day, I’m not going to bite my tongue anymore.

It’s already starting to show.  Part of the problem is, of course, in my own attitudes.  I often tell myself, in relation to horseback riding, that the horse only misbehaves as much as I let him.  If I don’t get respect it’s because I’ve given people little to no reason to.  If people don’t do what they’re supposed to, it’s because there’s no repercussions if they don’t.

I’m standing on the edge of changing all that.  Brotherhood of Oblivion is my guild.  Not Steve’s, not Josh’s, not anyone else’s.  I do want as many people happy as possible, yes.  It is not, in any way shape or form, all about me.  But right now, it is not in my best interest or theirs that GMing BoO makes me miserable.  And you know what?  It’s making me miserable.

Not any more.

I have my pointy stick, and my sand, and I shall be drawing some lines.  If you cross them I will POKE YOU IN THE MOTHER FUCKING EYE.

/brandishes stick

/pokes self

…ow.

I want to continue having fun in raids, killing bosses while having ribald conversations about buttsechs-but I want to do it without being talked over in vent during loot.  Tell jokes about how I get lost in Gruul’s and ToC, but don’t arms tank when I explicitly tell you not to.   Be my lovably dorky crew without…you know…being douchebags.

Novel concept?

We’ll see.

5 Things Your Pug Healer Wants You To Know

/wave to Altadin for the tank version.
There’s also a general DPS, mage, and DK version.  I copied first though, damn it!

1. Just because I have good gear does not mean you can be stupid.
Yes, my priest is solidly decked out.  No, this doesn’t mean you can do whatever the hell you want.  I can keep a tank up through most things a 5 man can dish out, but if the DPS is standing in bad?  Uh, no.  I’m a high crit, low haste disc priest healer set up for raid tank healing.  I am not set up to deal with all 5 of you trying to die at once.  Cut it the fuck out.

2. If you insist on running too far ahead of me, running out of range/line of sight, don’t get upset when you die.  It’s your own damn fault.

3. My mana bar is not your fucking buffet table.  I don’t want to have to run in after a wipe, buff, go OOM, drink, then have to heal you lazy gits and drink again.  Half the time we don’t have a mage so I’m using purchased water, so you can purchase some fucking food.  My own guildies were doing this to me last night and I wanted to slap them.  The only person who can get away with that level of lazy is Cranky Tank.  Unless you, too, are fucking your healer, don’t do it!  And then you’d better be good, because lazyness plus lousy sex is just fucking terrible.

4. Don’t pull aggro on mobs, then feign/soul shatter/cock ice block next to your healer.  I don’t want it, either, you dipshit!

5.  Don’t stupidly pull aggro on the waves of trash on the Two Dudes fight in HoR.
‘Cause then you almost die, and I panic and heal you, so they aggro on ME and then I die and we wipe AGAIN and just what the fuck hold on a god damn second will you?  Kthx.

BONUS 6. When it says “stop DPS” then you should STOP DPS…because usually, continuing DPS means you’re killing one of your team mates.  Seriously WTF?  No.  Here’s the secret: I CAN heal through stupid some of the time, I just choose not to. Okay?  Okay.  Don’t make me lose my penance button.

The Joys of Random Pugging

Edit: Broken recount is broken.  So let’s address the rest of the fail, because that’s still perfectly valid.  :P

If you don’t know an instance, speak up.   Better you ask than have your healer screaming obscenities at you IRL.  I mean sure, I’ll wonder inwardly how the hell you don’t know NEXUS, but that’s better than calling you a douchenozzle becuase you’re making my life insanely difficult, right?  I’ve had several cases of DPS wiping groups because they didn’t know fights already (though it makes more sense in the new heroics).  Bwuh?  ASK, PEOPLE.  At least for the new heroics, I stop and ask if people know the fights first.  If you don’t answer and then wipe us with something stupid, I’m going to be pissy. 

If a boss has spell reflect, it behooves you to notice your own dots stacking up on you and STOP.  PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD STOP.  If you keep taking a ton of damage, your healer is screaming JUMP at you in party, and you notice a stacking debuff?  Yeah.  Do it.  Please.

Speaking of heroic fails, my lovely tank healing, high crit, low haste build?  Yeah, it fucking sucks for heroics.  Oh the normal ones are fine, but if you get in the new ones with even a semi-derp derp group?  Yeah, kiss your sanity goodbye.  You can’t have low DPS in there.  You just can’t.  I know this because I tried.  And I couldn’t just group kick because they were guildies.  Bwuh.

How To Express An Opinion Without Being A Dick II

Dear Children Masquerading As Raiders And Even Officers In My Guild,

Can you grow the fuck up?  Look, I realize that So and So has an opinion you don’t agree with.  I realize that he has all the tact of a 16 year old in the middle of an emo fit with his parents sometimes.  But that doesn’t mean that you have carte blanche to turn around and act 5, instead. You can damn well put your epeens away and cut out the snide remarks.  It doesn’t help, and it doesn’t make you look better, nevermind right.  And when two of you are officers and in the middle of a raid, you really have no fucking excuse.

God damn, people.

Maybe said person needs to be removed from the guild, maybe he just causes too much strife because we’re not a good fit for him but, damn.  Again, not permission to act like children yourselves.   You can take your dodge/parry/stam stacking bloodshed somewhere else, and not during raid time.

RAWR.

-Angry Healer with the GM Hat

ToC + Shadow Spec + Amber = Angry

Technically, all 3 of my 80s can/are DPS.  We’ll ignore Ambrosine’s ret spec, though, because I can still muster nothing but fail in that area. 

That leaves me with Jamethera the BM hunter, and Lyrandre and sometimes shadow priest.

Now in  Ulduar, my hunter flailed around a bit because there are fights in there that are Not Very Nice towards pets, especially not one’s first time in.  If I’d had a bit more experience in there I’m sure I could have learned how to control Suicidal Mutt for each fight and thus been more effective, but…well, it is still not an instance kindly disposed towards BM hunters.  I did, however, shadow deeps in there more than once and while I didn’t top the meters I did over 3k and held my own.  My priest doesn’t know what top of the meters means, anyway.  The best DPS I’ve seen as shadow was 4.9 on Ony (LOL MIND SEAR). 

Now take ToC.  I was able to bring my hunter into…well, one.  But during that one, I was solid DPS and my pet didn’t die at all what the hell.  Now when I say “solid DPS” I mean “I was #2 on damage done in a group with admittedly inferior composition”.  So, you know, I was some of the least sucky of a group of suck.  BUT, that was without any of the buffs that actually make me Not Suck.  Anyway.  I WASN’T REALLY THAT TERRIBLE.  Last night though, due to…odd sign ups, we shifted shit around and I was shadow all night*.

I considered myself lucky if I broke 3k.  I was doing the DPS my hunter can do in a favorable FIVE MAN in a TWENTY FIVE MAN RAID.  What the FUCK.  ToC?  Lots of target switching, lots of wanting to burst things down quickly.  Shadow priests?  No burst.  None.  I can’t even switch targets and instantly have full DPS, no, I MIGHT hit my full DPS potential by the time the thing is half or three-quarters dead.  MIGHT.

I sat there and said to myself, “Self, your lesser geared hunter would have done better in here.  What the HELL.”

It wasn’t just one or two fights that there unfriendly to my DPS.  It was ALL OF THEM.  ALL of them were either “switch targets repeatedly!” fights or “lol get interrupted by crap!” fights.  THE ENTIRE GOD DAMNED ISNTANCE GIVES MY SHADOW PRIEST THE MIDDLE FINGER.

…

Now I’m not the best shadow priest ever, and I’m sure there are shadow priests out there who will read this and go “Well YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG.”  But there are others who dual spec shadow in the guild, others who are better than me…and suddenly no one wants to go shadow anymore. 

 /cranky

Fuck you too, ToC!  Fuck you too!

 

*So we had a holy priest go tankadin, and a warrior tank go holy paladin, and a tankadin go holy, a disc priest go shadow (because 4 tank healers is overkill).  If that sounds confusing, it was.  There was logic (mostly related to gear) in there somewhere though, I swear.