I need a smaller sense of responsibility.

I am back from Disneyworld and expressing mild displeasure at the Chicago weather once more.  Twenty or so degrees colder here, blah!

Of course this also means I have to dive back into whatever guild messes have cropped up in my absence, and find myself facing down my own disgruntlement.

I love GMing.  I also hate GMing.  It comes down to this deep sense of responsibility I bear for…well, every god damned thing.  On one hand, it pushes me to be the best GM I can.  On the other hand, when other people don’t live up to my inner grandoise standards, I can get…resentful.  Even if said resentment is born of a situation I created my own damned self.

The guild culture in BoO is relaxed compared to some.  Can’t make some raids due to RL?  Okay, cool.  Whatever.  Shit happens.  Join us when you can.  We raid, but not everyone in the guild is a raider.  People sometimes bounce between Raiding and Not Raiding depending on what is going on.  Or by choice.

And you know, for the most part, that’s fine.  A problem crops up when several people say eh, I don’t like 25s as much, and I only want to do 10s.  All around the sane time.  A situation that is definitely brewing, if not already happening, in BoO.

*takes a deep breath*

I’m the GM.  The guild focus is currently 25s.  It will remain 25s until our heads are bloodied against that wall, if my reading of the officer core that runs the guild is correct.  This means that if we loose too many people to do 25s, it’s back to the recruitment/canceled raid grind I hate so much.  This also means that my limited raiding time is locked into those two 25 man days a week, no matter what happens.  I am not the only one who is probably locked into those days either, as people have had to tweak work and school schedules to make those days.  This means that there’s at least a handful of people that are affected every single time a 25 man raid is called due to numbers.  We can’t split into 10s–there’s already guild 10s going during other days of the week.  People are saved.  A canceled ICC 25 turns into a ToC 25 or…nothing.

A canceled ICC 25 means that I don’t get to raid, because I can’t make most of those 10s, or at best, only 1 day of 2.  I don’t really feel that it’s fair to the rest of that group to do that on a regular basis, though I’m glad to step in if they need and ask me to.

I will keep the 25s going as best I can because that is my job.  It is the responsibility that I willingly took on.

But I can’t help but be jealous of others ability to step back and do 10s.  I, too, love the cozier atmosphere of 10s (though I don’t love 25s any less).  I will miss the people that have decided that they are done with 25s becuase…well, now I won’t get to raid with them, and I consider some of them friends.  Meanwhile I’ll recruit and wheedle and beg and fill raids with people who…probably shouldn’t even be there until we’re in a good spot again.   Maybe I’ll make new friends!  But I’ll complain about it anyway.

YES I MADE MY BED AND I WILL LIE IN IT BUT I RESERVE THE RIGHT TO BITCH THE ENTIRE GOD DAMNED TIME. 

But this post has been entirely too bitter.  For those of you who missed the OMG CAPS announcement on Twitter during my vacation, my dear Cranky Tank proposed just after the EPCOT fireworks, and because I’m just as crazy as he is, I said yes.  Everyone who also follows my personal blog is therefore OFFICIALLY WARNED as to future wedding related contents and may now flee before it is too late.

\o/

Oh, and the promised picture of a SMILING Bubbles will be posted as soon as a pry it off the lap top!

Hunter Flavor: Y’all Can Hate Me Now

It had occurred to me that, as a BM hunter, I should really have a Spirit Beast.  I mean…yeah, they’re not exactly the choice DPS pet right now, but…dude, Spirit Beast.   Every BM hunter should have on in their stable to play Pokemans with, right? 

I had looked for Loque a grand total of…once before and the others, never.  It being a Tuesday night, I figured that maaaaaybe it was a good day to look.  Maaaaybe.  So Jamethera hopped on her trusty Netherdrake and toured the Basin.  Nada.  Well, poop.

What the hell, I thought.  Let’s go look for the others.  I flappy flappy over to Zul’drak and swoop over Gondria’s spawn points.

At the last one, SilverDragon pings.

OH FUCK.

No really, that’s what I said.  “Oh, fuck.”

Naturally she spawned next to the shrine with the elites.  Sure enough, mid tame, one of them wanders over and smacks me to death.

“Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.”

I run back.  Rez in a corner.  Drop the trap in the corner.  Start taming.

Watch a bear walk over to me…

“Fuuuuck.”

Tame completes before the bear goes OMNOMNOM on my face.

“WOOT.”

Now, for the hard part: a name!  EYELZRZ?   

My original snow leopard, companion through vanilla and all of my BC raiding, is Schneeflocke.  My Devilsaur is Omnomnom, because I thought that was the most hilarious name ever for a dinosaur (and still do).  The Core Hound is LootTheDog, for all of us former Molten Core raiders.  My wolf is Cúchulainn, a figure from Celtic mythology.  As you can see, I’m kind of all over the place for pet names.  We’ll have to see what “sticks”.

On second thought: another pet to level?  FUCK!

This Post Is Epic

Please go read this, and know everything you need to know about raiding.

It is full of win and Amber Approves.

MOAR MIND SEAR

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:

• Glyph of Mind Flay now Increases the damage done by your Mind Flay spell by 10% when your target is afflicted with Shadow Word: Pain.
• Glyph of Shadow Word: Pain changed to – The periodic damage ticks of your Shadow Word: Pain spell restore 1% of your base mana.
• Glyph of Shadow now increases your spell power by 30% of your spirit for 10 sec. (Up from 10%) (Here’s the current version.)
• Improved Devouring Plague: This spell now deals 10/20/30% of its total periodic effect instantly, up from 5/10/15%.
• Shadowform: This talent also now causes Devouring Plague, Shadow Word: Pain, and Vampiric Touch to benefit from haste. Both the period length and the duration of these spells will be reduced by haste. In addition, the mana cost has been reduced from 32% to 13% of base mana.
• Vampiric Embrace: This ability is now provides a 30-minute buff that cannot be dispelled, instead of a target debuff.

/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.

Thoughts on Iron Council and Freya

Begin Rambling Here

First off, I have to call out for Steve being a scrub here-he didn’t research the Freya fight because he didn’t think we’d get past the Iron Council.  We downed the Iron Council in only 3-4 attempts, one of which didn’t count because Josh and I DC’d moments after the pull.   Granted, they apparently gave group 1 a bit of trouble before, but I still mock his lack of confidence.

Naturally this meant that we got to Freya’s room, started cluelessly pulling trash and…OW.  Cue me putting in /rw, “Trash is srs bzns!”  Yeah, no more blindly wandering into even trash…though nothing shall compare to C’thun trash.  Ever.  …I hope.

After we recovered from unsolicited attentions from over-sized flowers, we stared at the boss and went “Hmmm.”   Then we went and looked for videos (my google-fu is better than Steve’s-I found the 10 man video!), and had three people describe the fight while showing obvious signs of having tuned out half of the previous commentary (“Did you talk about the Touch of Eonar?”  “Yes, Josh.  I said to kill the trees.”)

One day I should record me explaining a boss fight.  “At that point, you’ll see these green trees spawn.  You need to kill them OH MY GOD QUICKLY, because otherwise they’ll heal the boss and we’ll want to hunt you down and stab you in the face.  So kill the trees, mmkay?”  I don’t bother to get into technical terms like Touch of Eonar.  Who the hell is going to know what that is?!  I like to translate things into “raider speak”.   Also, it amuses me. 

Anyway.  At some point, after wave after wave of flowery chaos, I lost it and just started going “badger badger badger badger MUSHROOM, MUSHROOM” to the complete bafflement of everyone in the raid.  I can’t say how much progress we made-we only got a couple of attempts in, and it was rather chaotic.  It can be summed up with “adds did not die like they were supposed to.”  Hopefully a week to mull over things and do further research will be the magic trick, as it was with Iron Council.  I really…don’t quite GET the Freya fight, perhaps because as a healer all I’m worried about is my little green bars and the location of the nearest mushroom.

If nothing else, I was there for one progression boss kill AND got a dagger out of it-woo!  No more H Nexus mace! 

Begin Somewhat Useful Observation Here

Freya aside, I enjoyedIron Council for reasons not related to shiny loot they handed over.  For one thing, I had to dig out skills I remember perfecting back in the days of AQ40-mana management.  Only back then I was chain drinking pots, and now I’m jugging ability cooldowns.

At 75%, use shadow fiend.  When I dip back down again (“down” meaning sub-75%, not almost OOM…the intent is to prevent being OOM, after all) I scoot over to my other healers (assuming I’m not already near them) and use Hymn of Hope.   If you have multiple priests, sharing your Hymn of Hope really helps. 

And then…I wait.  If I hit the 50% mark and my cooldowns aren’t up soon, I go for a mana pot.  By the time my mana bar is dwindling into the “uh-oh!” stages, my shadow fiend should be back up.  In the final “oh god oh god the boss is almost dead but my mana is almost gone!” part I usually have my Hymn back up. 

 I toss Pain Supression on the tank while channeling Hymn to try to prevent any unhappy “oh SHIT!” moments.

It’s really “fun” to be on a tank “and raid.”  Mmhmm.

Monday Recap

As always, I spent a lot of my weekend playing WoW, so Monday tends to be lawl, recap day.  This Saturday was actually mostly spent on belated birthday celebrations, in which I was dragged to Medieval Times and spent hours going “OH MY GOD STEAL ME THAT PONEH.”  Because nothing will turn me into a puddle of happy faster than cheesy acting, food eaten with fingers, and Delicious Andalusians to stare at. Seriously people: Best.  Horses.  EVAR.   There was this one black one that was…my dream horse.  Right there.  RIGHT THERE.  OH MY GOD.  /dies

…wait, this is a WoW blog, innit?  Fuck.  Okay. 

PONEH PONEH PON-

…ahem.

I had scheduled a 10 man Naxxon Sunday “for the lulz” as the calender says.  What this basically meant was that loot rules were suspended, ’cause no one is gonna bring their alt if it can’t get gear.  Ironically we ended up with only one alt, and then several mains who were after a few items still.  And me.  The loothoover.  Omnomnomnomloot.

Of course I mostly ended up hoovering offset gear, ’cause the loot gods were being silly like that.  I can now be hitcapped in shadow spec.  Woo?  Yeah, I’ll have to lrn2shadowpriest at some point.  I haven’t had a caster DPS class since my mage, who has been level 55 for a couple of years now.  I did get a spiffy offhand and hat, though, for disc pew pew lazer fun. 

I found, however, that I kept running…OOM.  Whaaaat?  Either my stats are offbalance (possible),  or the complete and utter lack of a replenishment class really sucked that much (also entirely possible).  Oh, and of course, Sapph battles that last for THIRTEEN FUCKING MINUTES also probably play a part.  When he finally went down I was all, LAWL, OLD SKOOL RAIDINS.  Because seriously, do you remember those 15 minute boss fights?  I remember those fifteen minute boss fights.  The paladins would flail at the guild leader if he said “Alright, buff up,” and then proceeded to explain further details of the fight, ’cause 15 minute fights + 15 minute buffs = shut the fuck up and PULL.  We did that many a time in Nef’s room, let me tell you.   Yell at the GL, that is. 

“Didn’t you say you had only one alt?  Why the low DPS?”

Well, see, some of the DPS likes to DIE. 

…what!  Don’t look at me!  We had 3 healers.  If the DPS died they were like, trying, or something.  You know how rogues are.  And DPS warriors.  And mages.  Always eating floor!  At least we one shot him…it just took…a really long time.  I used my shadow fiend 3 times and even got innervated.  WTF!  Pallys don’t get in-

Oh, right.

KT was a similarly epic battle, in which we lost Zuki to the Lag Let The Red Zone Eat Me Even Though I Was Totally Far Enough Away demon.  And the tank went down and was b-rezzed.   Oops.  The DPS warrior died to the I Didn’t See It demon (nasty mob, that-it ate Kyr on 4H, too).   It’s kind of like a Grue, you know, the I Didn’t See It demon…

Anyway.

We had never cleared Naxx in one day before.  Granted it was one very long, holy shit we’ve been in here a couple of hours now clear, but we were all like WOO! and it was good. 

I definitely like disc priesting-except for the part where they told me to MC a mob in Naxx25 on Wednesday and I wanted to DIE, let me tell you-but it’s been strange, floundering along in my first few raids sans my more seasoned ally, The Amazing Ron.  He’s supposed to be here helping me!  D:  Kyr managed to get me through the MCing, at least.  <3 Kyr!

My favorite part so far was on the Maexxna fight.  “He won’t survive,” Josh said, referring to our tank.  Indeed, his health was dipping rather low whilst we were all held captive in the webs.  “Ha!” I replied, as I sat there spamming Penance until we were free so it would cast OMG RIGHT AWAY and save the tank!  And it did!  Woo! 

PEW PEW LAZERZ!

And that is why disc priests are totally fucking awesome, yo.

Late Night Update:

-Brotherhood of Oblivion has now cleared Naxx10.
-I now have a shaman alt named Icestone.  I have no idea what I’ll do with this alt, other than plink around on her with my sister, but I am endlessly amused by her none the less.
-Seriously-Icestone?  No one beat me to that name?!

/flail

So, before today, the highest number of hits on any page of my blog was, oh….80?  Maybe? 

Today it is…1,898.

/FLAIL

This wordpress stuff is all still pretty new to me, but the general impression I get is that I got linked to from some place where, you know, more people read this shit.  

/peers

AAAH.

/flails more

/looks around

/waves shyly

I’mma gonna go back to being a cranky healer now.  Here’s to not having to tell DPS to shush in tonight’s raid.  Mebbe.  And back to that post with “actual content” that’s been in my drafts for a few days…

I can has buttons?

Yay! Lyr dinged 64 and now has binding heal.

WEE MORE HEALS TO PLAY WITH.

…now where the hell do I put it?