Category: blogging

Do I think World of Warcraft is a game?

Kurn / / blogging, general, ramblings, Uncategorized

The other week, I asked you all if you thought World of Warcraft was a game, based on this (admittedly very specific) definition of a game:

“A game is a system in which players engage in an artificial conflict, defined by rules, that results in a quantifiable outcome.” – Sulen and Zimmerman

My first instinct was to say yes, WoW is a game. Then I realized something. While WoW attempts to set you up, right from the start, in this artificial conflict, defined by rules, that results in a quantifiable outcome, you don’t have to do what they’re telling you to do.

When you start a character, you are placed in the starting zone and you are right next to a quest-giver. (Bear with me, I’ll be speaking primarily of the human starting zone.)

The developers (and common sense, really) expect you to interact with the quest-giver and complete the quest. Right off the bat, there’s the artificial conflict — you need to go kill wolves in Northshire, for example. As soon as you accept a quest, you are thrust into the artificial conflict. That initial human quest (as all others, I would imagine) immediately pits you against the environment and NPC mobs (wolves or what-have-you) in that environment.

Once you accept the quest, you have three options:

1) Complete the quest (quantifiable outcome — experience, quest rewards)
2) Drop the quest (quantifiable outcome — the lack of gaining experience, quest rewards)
3) Ignore the quest (quantifiable outcome — the lack of gaining experience, quest rewards)

All of that, however, hinges on actually picking up the quest.

If you don’t pick up the quest, there’s no immediate conflict. Nothing in the starting area will aggro on to you. You can essentially run around with impunity until you leave the Northshire gates and enter Elwynn Forest.

When you enter Elwynn Forest, you will encounter NPCs that are, for the first time, hostile to you and will attack you upon sight. This is a conflict and it’s defined by rules. The rules are simple: defend yourself with attacks until either you or the NPC dies or run away, knowing that the NPC is limited to a small area and will almost certainly not run away themselves. The quantifiable outcome is either victory (you lived and killed the NPC), defeat (you died because the NPC killed you), or a stalemate (you ran away and both of you lived).

My argument is that WoW itself is not a game. WoW does not inherently force you to engage in any of its sub-games, such as questing or exploring, PVPing or raiding, dungeoning or crafting, gathering or levelling.

Having said that, I believe that WoW is host to many, many games. Everything that can grant you experience, gold, achievements or feats of strength is a game. Anything that puts your character in danger of death is another game. Healing is a huge game with many sub-games, such as tank healing, raid healing, cooldown use, mana management, as well as the various encounter mechanics. (I’m not even going to touch on PVP healing!)

It might be splitting hairs to some, but I feel strongly that WoW is not a game on its own. It is a system that hosts a plethora of games. Most of those games, like healing, have sub-games within them.

However, I feel that WoW is more than just a system. It is definitely a system, but it also comprises all the social interaction that comes with an MMO. While there can be arguments made that “the social game” is a game, I think that the social part of things is less of a game, from the definition I gave, and more of a tool that can either help or hinder you in your game-related goals.

Following instructions in a raid setting will help your team defeat the encounter (assuming a competent raid leader) while not paying attention to instructions will likely end up killing you or others in your group. As such, the game of raiding within WoW relies heavily on communication and cooperation between raid members to emerge victorious after an encounter attempt. This is, of course, very different from the “socialness” of Trade Chat.

Is Trade Chat’s “socialness” a game? Again, I would argue not. It is merely a tool to help you to know who to avoid teaming up with, or that some people may be seeking others to help them with a dungeon or raid. Perhaps people playing the Auction House game (I do believe that’s a game) use Trade Chat to announce their auctions. Chat is a tool, not a game in and of itself. And chat belongs to the system that is WoW.

Essentially, while I do call World of Warcrat a game for simplicity’s sake, there are really just a multitude of games that WoW hosts and those are the games about which we are passionate.

Is World of Warcraft a game?

Kurn / / blogging, ramblings

So I’m back in school and taking an English (!) course called Video Games as/and Literature. We started out by talking about the definition of a game.  The first one we looked at was this:

“A game is a system in which players engage in an artificial conflict, defined by rules, that results in a quantifiable outcome.” – Sulen and Zimmerman

By that definition, is World of Warcraft a game?

I’ll post my thoughts (and the thoughts some of my classmates had) in a separate entry later this week, but wanted to hear what you guys had to say.

Healing Webring 2.0

Kurn / / blogging, healing

So apparently Saunder is back and wants to take the community’s pulse on healing, the way Miss Medicina did back in the day. I was delightfully surprised to see that Beruthiel tagged me, so I now have a reason to do it immediately rather than “when I have time”. (Which, let’s face it, is pretty rare.)

1. What is the name, class, and spec of your primary healer? Madrana, Holy Paladin

2. What is your primary group healing environment? (i.e. raids, pvp, 5 mans) 25-man raids

3. What is your favourite healing spell for your class and why? My favourite healing spell… uh. Hm. I said Holy Shock, previously. I’m not sure if that’s true anymore. I don’t like how it is THE SPELL you now get and all the emphasis on it. It’s like, I really enjoyed it and now they’ve made it our CENTRAL SPELL. So now I don’t like it as much? I still LOVE Lay on Hands, though, even though it can’t crit anymore.

4. What healing spell do you use least for your class and why? Probably a tie between Flash of Light and Light of Dawn. FoL is stupidly expensive and I never liked the idea of redirecting LoD’s heals to the beacon as a tank heal. If you want to heal the damn tank, heal the damn tank with your Holy Power. And they’ve made that not just possible but better with the buff to Word of Glory. That’s not to say I NEVER use LoD, but I don’t use it as a tank heal for the most part.

5. What do you feel is the biggest strength of your healing class and why? I think our biggest strength is our cooldowns. While we no longer have Divine Sacrifice/Divine Guardian, we still have Hand of Sacrifice, Lay on Hands, Aura Mastery, Hand of Protection, Hand of Salvation, Hand of Freedom… We have a huge toolkit.

6. What do you feel is the biggest weakness of your healing class and why? I feel that they’ve diluted us rather than improved us, to be honest. In trying to allow everyone to “tank heal” and “raid heal”, we don’t really own the tank healing niche any longer, but there’s no way we can “compete” with resto druids or resto shaman or holy priests, if you look at it from a numbers perspective. I loved excelling at tank healing and now I feel clunky especially compared to a disc priest who leaves huge Divine Aegis’ on a tank after every crit.

7. In a 25 man raiding environment, what do you feel, in general, is the best healing assignment for you? Tank healing, or single-target healing. I think a good holy paladin can focus on the raid really well and be substantial support healing on a tank, too, but I don’t think most paladins can really do that regularly. I know I can’t.

8. What healing class do you enjoy healing with most and why? Hm. If on a single target, I like a disc priest or a resto shaman. I like the disc’s mitigation, but I love the resto shaman’s mastery translating into bigger heals. If in a raid setting, probably druids or holy priests.

9. What healing class do you enjoy healing with least and why? I guess another holy paladin? Just because I’m aware of our limitations.

10. What is your worst habit as a healer? I know when I’m not playing to my fullest extent and it happens a lot. I think part of it is that I’m also trying to help lead the raids and watch things, call out for a BR, etc, but MAN, it sucks when I finish a fight (wipe or kill) and go “crap, I totally forgot to use (ability)!!”.

11. What is your biggest pet peeve in a group environment while healing? People expecting me to heal them through their mistakes. Like, FFS, people. Get out of the bad crap on the ground. Also, people not using personal defensive CDs.

12. Do you feel that your class/spec is well balanced with other healers for PvE healing? Nope. I think they really missed the boat on this one this time around. It wasn’t balanced at the class level in Wrath, but if you took a step back, all five healing specs worked really nicely with each other, at least towards the end. Now, though, a single holy paladin can’t really do the same healing as a resto druid, resto shaman or holy priest (which we couldn’t do before), but neither can we really compete with a disc priest on single-target heals OR raid heals. Well, there’s assignments and such to take into consideration and player skill as well, but I don’t raid heal because there are others better suited for it. And I don’t feel we’re particularly strong at tank healing any longer, particularly with the change to Beacon of Light between Wrath and Cataclysm. I think we should all answer this question in Tier 13/Tier 14 and see how things are then.

13. What tools do you use to evaluate your own performance as a healer? Did my target live? Good. Then I berate myself while browsing through World of Logs looking at all the crap I didn’t do that I should have.

14. What do you think is the biggest misconception people have about your healing class? I’m not sure. If it’s still prevalent out there, the idea that we’re a one-button healer? We haven’t been, not since Vanilla. And it’s pretty hard to change people’s minds on that, I’ve found.

15. What do you feel is the most difficult thing for new healers of your class to learn? Cooldown usage. It’s one thing to know when to use Aura Mastery (fairly simple), but another thing to know how/when to BOP/HoFreedom your tank to remove stacks of a debuff, another thing to pair Hand of Sacrifice with Divine Protection, yet another thing to think to cast Salv on that arcane mage as soon as mirror images drop and yet another thing to toss Hand of Freedom on someone standing in ice.

16. If someone were to try to evaluate your performance as a healer via recount, what sort of patterns would they see (i.e. lots of overhealing, low healing output, etc)? Overhealing, leading to low healing output and a decent use of cooldowns — just never quite enough use of them. (Must judge more!)

17. Haste or Crit and why? Haste is my best friend. There’s so much of it needed, though, that after… 1859, I think it is, I don’t really worry too much. 1859 means an extra tick of Holy Radiance. That said, I’ll still seek out more haste gear (but not worry if I can’t get it) so that I can continue to lower my GCD. With so many instant-cast spells (Holy Shock, Word of Glory, Light of Dawn, Beacon of Light, all our cooldowns, etc), it’s important to bring that as close to 1s as possible, IMHO.

18. What healing class do you feel you understand least? Probably druids at this point? I’ve tinkered with my shaman alt (who can do heroics at 85), messed around a bit with my level 80 priest but haven’t touched my level 80 druid. At all.

19. What add-ons or macros do you use, if any, to aid you in healing? Grid/Clique. I think if I lost my Grid debuff settings, I would actually cry. Clique bindings are less panic-inducing if I think about losing them, but definitely Grid & Clique are the top addons I use to help me in healing. I use several macros as well, but most of them are just to get me to use various things more frequently.

20. Do you strive primarily for balance between your healing stats, or do you stack some much higher than others, and why? My stat priority is: Intellect, then spirit/haste (I like to be around 2300 spirit and about 1859 haste), followed by crit and then mastery.

Now, who to tag? Well, first of all, feel free to do it if you want to do it. I’d love to see some more healers out there answering this!

That said, Saunder’s instructions said to pick three healers not of your class, so…

Druid: Jasyla of Cannot Be Tamed
Shaman: Darista of Daritos’ Food for Thought
Priest: Kaleri of Power Word: What?

And, like Beru, I’m going to cheat. I’d love to see Fannon, of Dwarven Battle Medic, fill this out, too!

Day 20 – Last Day Playing WoW

Kurn / / 20 days challenge, blogging, ramblings

This post is part of Saga’s 20 Days of WoW Blogging Challenge!

See, I’ve always seen my last day of playing WoW as something I wouldn’t know was happening at the time. I envision myself not being guilded, not logging on much and then, one day, not logging on at all until I realize… hey. I’ve stopped playing WoW.

As such, this is a bit of a difficult challenge. If I were to consciously stop playing WoW, what would I do on my last day?

Let us assume that, in order to stop playing WoW, certain requirements have to be met.

1) For one reason or another, I am no longer in Apotheosis. Whether that would mean that the guild has fallen apart or that I’ve just moved on is irrelevant. There’s very little chance of me choosing to stop playing if I’m still in Apotheosis and we’re still an active guild.

2) Majik and Fog must also have stopped playing. I had a lot of fun on alts with these two bozos during Wrath, so I imagine I’d still play, even occasionally, if they were still playing, too.

3) My friends on Proudmoore must have stopped playing, or have stopped playing during times when I can conceivably play with them.

4) Choice must no longer exist, since I’m fairly sure that if anything goes wrong with my guild and we fall apart, I’ll high-tail it to Choice, if they’ll have me.

So with all of those conditions met, there wouldn’t be a lot TO do in the game for me. No running dungeons with friends, no raiding, nothing of the kind.

I think what I would do is load up Kurn with all my money (which, at the moment, is a fairly modest amount) and go to Darnassus and Teldrassil and give out 1000g to a variety of lowbies, until all my money is gone.

The lowbies would have to be unguilded, not wearing any heirlooms or anything of the kind. They would have to be actual new players to the game.

Once done with that, I’d probably go try to kite Spellmaw to Everlook in my T0.5 gear for the fun of it and then hop on to Madrana to log her out in her T0 gear in Stormwind.

Then back on to Kurn to log out, in the T0.5 gear, just outside the entrance to Strat Undead. Strat UD was my favourite classic instance and probably the second high-level instance I ran. I know every nook and cranny of that instance, every mob, every pull. I did the 45-minute run three times, although the first one didn’t count because either my cat, Whisper, or Tia’s imp, Volloz, got the killing blow on the Baron. The second time was at about the 43-minute mark and essentially had our buddy Football “tanking” by virtue of hamstringing the mobs that were trying to kill Tia and Tandrace. The third time, my cat tanked it and we did it with Crypt, Tia, Tan, Majik and myself. And we did it in 39 minutes.

I loved running that place and it seems fitting that Kurn would log out in the hallway leading to the instance entrance, in T0.5 gear that was acquired thanks to one of the more challenging questlines in the game, part of which took place there.

I still think it’s a lot more likely that my interest in the game will wane over time and that I won’t know it’s my last day when it IS my last day, but if I made the choice to stop playing, that’s pretty much what I’d do.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, brings us to the end of the 20-Day Challenge! Thanks so much to Saga for writing it up and challenging us all to do it. I had a lot of fun. :)

Yesterday: In Your Bags/Bank
Tomorrow: Possibly nothing at all!

Day 19 – In Your Bags/Bank

Kurn / / 20 days challenge, blogging, ramblings

This post is part of Saga’s 20 Days of WoW Blogging Challenge!

Oh, God. If there’s one thing more cluttered than my UI, it’s my bags and my bank. Click on the images for much larger versions.

First up is Kurn’s bags and bank.

And now Madrana’s.

Feel free to ask me any questions about any item you see, haha. Most of the things in my banks have long, storied histories. The stuff in my bags is stuff I want that’s easily accessible, mostly. In the case of Madrana’s bags, this includes my laughable ret gear and my laughable tank gear.

Yesterday: Your Favourite Outfit
Tomorrow: If this was your last day playing WoW, what would you do?

Day 18 – Your Favourite Outfit

Kurn / / 20 days challenge, blogging

This post is part of Saga’s 20 Days of WoW Blogging Challenge!

I have two favourite outfits.

The first is the Beastmaster Armor set. I worked so hard for that stupid Tier 0.5 quest chain and it took me forever, FOREVER, to get the Beaststalker’s Chest, which was the last piece I needed for the quest chain. I don’t even particularly like the look (although the shoulders are pretty iconic) but that 8/8 just means so much to me.

And the other is the Lightforge Armor set. Though I never really used most of it to heal, I wore it whenever I wasn’t actively healing. Just putting on the shoulders made me feel like a “real” paladin. And it goes so well with the Stormpike tabard!

Yesterday: Your Favourite Spot
Tomorrow: In your bags/bank

Day 17 – Your Favourite Spot

Kurn / / 20 days challenge, blogging

This post is part of Saga’s 20 Days of WoW Blogging Challenge!

I am actually having a lot of trouble coming up with a favourite spot, either in or out of game.

I think it’s made more difficult because so much has changed in WoW. New zones, revamped old zones…

Well, let’s look at what “favourite” means to me.

A favourite spot has to be quiet, familiar, pleasant to look at and relaxing, I think.

I think maybe Nagrand is that to me. I spent a lot of time in Nagrand in Burning Crusade. I farmed a lot, both at Elemental Plateau and over by the Clefthoofs, I fished a lot (again, Elemental Plateau and elsewhere) and really, just enjoyed the zone a great deal. Except for Corki. But it’s the one Outlands zone I actually make an effort to go through when I level. It’s just such a beautiful place and it’s so quiet if you’re just questing or farming.

I don’t really have a favourite spot IRL, to be honest. There are plenty of places where I like to go, but too many to pick a favourite. And many of those places are dependent on the time of year and the company I’m in! :)

Yesterday: Things You Miss
Tomorrow: Your Favourite Outfit

Day 16 – Things You Miss

Kurn / / 20 days challenge, blogging, ramblings

This post is part of Saga’s 20 Days of WoW Blogging Challenge!

Well, this is a bit of a list, really.

– Hunters using mana. No, really. I miss my mana bar. I’m getting used to the throttling of our damage provided by focus, but I miss my mana bar.

– Divine Plea on a 1m cooldown.

– 100% Beacon healing.

– Sacred Shield. I REALLY miss Sacred Shield. A lot.

– I miss wanting tier gear. I just picked up my T11 shoulders because they dropped and because they’re marginally better than the Chimaeron ones in terms of base stats (crit vs. mastery). That might be the only piece of tier I pick up.

– I miss the old lockout system! If you zoned in to an instance that was already partially cleared, you were saved. If you were in a fresh instance where you killed a boss, you were saved. EASY. I know, many people enjoy the flexibility, but we ran into more lockout issues tonight. Total bullshit.

– Auberdine. I spent a lot of WoW time in Auberdine while levelling Kurn. And a friend of mine from one of my stats classes was farming furbolgs for Timbermaw rep and he made his hearth the inn in Auberdine, way, way back in the day, before BC came out. I was at his place once and he showed me his toon (level 60 warlock) and showed me why Auberdine was his hearth — one flight point from Darnassus (AH/bank/etc) and one or two flight points away from Felwood, where he’d spend most of his time.

– I miss the occasional true tank-and-spank fight. Don’t get me wrong, I love a lot of the newer mechanics we see… but sometimes, a tank’n’spank is just what I crave. :)

– I miss Valithria Dreamwalker! Well, not her. And not flying. But I miss the fact that it was a “heal this boss to full” fight as opposed to yet another “kill this before it kills you” fight.

– Most of all, I miss the knowledge that I had accumulated over 2 or so years. I’m stuck relearning everything, all the mechanics, all the player abilities and such, so that I can do my job of leading raids better. I just wish I could know it all NOW, you know?

Yesterday: Your Desktop Background
Tomorrow: Your favourite spot (in game or outside it)

Day 15 – Your Desktop Background

Kurn / / 20 days challenge, blogging, ramblings

This post is part of Saga’s 20 Days of WoW Blogging Challenge!

My desktop background is moderately boring, but I’m happy with it.

That is the logo for the Montreal Metro system — our subway. It’s actually a photo I took of the logo in one of the shopping malls in downtown Montreal, indicating there’s metro access from that mall.

I spent some time (two years!) in Virginia in the US and it was always the Montreal Metro I missed when I was there. When I’d come home to visit, I wouldn’t feel like I was home yet until I rode on the subway. I’m not the only nut out there who loves the metro system, at least. :)

So it’s a plain background, but it’s one that’s pleasant enough to look at and tends to have a calming effect on me.

Yesterday: This Upsets You
Tomorrow: Things you miss (post Cataclysm)

Day 14 – This Upsets You

Kurn / / 20 days challenge, blogging, facepalm, raiding, ramblings, throne of the four winds

This post is part of Saga’s 20 Days of WoW Blogging Challenge!

All righty, here’s my last planned post for today, thanks for reading “Contentpalooza 2011”! ;)

Day 14 – This Upsets You

Oh, Lordy. This is almost too much to consider. A better question would be “this doesn’t upset you”. ;)

Actually, truth be told, in-game, not a lot flat-out upsets me. I know, I know. You’re shocked. What it is that really upsets me is the people. I’ll get into that in a minute, but here’s some in-game stuff that upsets me.

– Loot and randomness. Being able to kill Gandling in Scholomance 27 times and see the Beaststalker’s Cap twice (and losing the roll once), or being able to kill General Drakkisath SIXTY TIMES before seeing a Beaststalker Tunic is ridiculous. Even in Wrath, this held true. 24 kills of heroic Saurfang and 0, count that, 0 drops of the Heroic Belt of the Blood Nova. (Not that I’d wear it now, being that it’s mail, but anyways.) 13 Halion kills, 0 drops of the Foreshadow Steps.

And this continues today. 8 Cho’gall kills (that’s, you know, 2 full months) and 0 drops of Shackles of the End of Days. And I’m doing this on 25, so I’m getting 5 drops off Cho’gall each time (plus 3 tier tokens). That is 40 possible drops and we have had 0 bracers drop.

I’m not asking for things to drop every single time you kill a boss. Not even every 5 times. I’m not even asking for non-useless gear not to drop (ie: healing plate with no paladins in the group). I’m just asking for better odds than 2/27, 1/60, 0/13 and 0/8.

Kurn’s UpsetMeter: 5/10 (Moderate)

– Raid Lockout Screwups. As detailed in my last post, this new raid lock system screwed us up last night, made us lose an hour or more of our raid time and has made us change our plans for the week. This isn’t limited to the new system, though, there were several “aw crap” moments with the old lock system as well. Still, at this point, I’d much prefer the old one. (For me. I know the new one makes a lot more sense for a lot of people, particularly those who aren’t guilded or those not doing their raiding in a guild setting.)

Kurn’s UpsetMeter: 7/10 (High)

Everything else, game-wise, I can generally take. Getting stunlocked by a rogue or three, fine. Login errors? Fine, computers aren’t perfect.

The rest of the things that piss me off are things people do. True, some of them are made possible by game mechanics, but ultimately, it’s people in this game who piss me off.

– Racist/Homophobic/Prejudicial Language. Fastest way to piss me off is to throw a bunch of disparaging epithets into a sentence. People are people, dammit, and I don’t care what colour their skin is, who they love, who they worship (if they do) or any of that crap. They’re people. Even bad players are people. The fact that Trade Chat is typically filled with these various slurs means I spend a lot of time reporting spam on various people and, in the case of some really bad ones, I’ll open a ticket and explain precisely why the person’s language is upsetting.

Kurn’s UpsetMeter: 8/10 (High)

– Not doing your job in a group. This goes for 5-mans, raids, everything. It drives me nuts to join a pug and realize that, out of the five people in the group, myself and maybe one other person are doing their role-related jobs adequately. It also drives me nuts if someone just cannot master a mechanic in raid content. I am not the fastest learner. I have a learning curve and, given my crappy-ass computer, it can be steep. But I learn, I adapt OR, in the case of Teron Gorefiend, I SIT MYSELF. My computer at the time didn’t allow me to be quick enough to get all my constructs — I’d lag on the transition and no matter how fast I hit my buttons, I’d only get a couple of my constructs trapped. This was okay if I wasn’t the first person targetted, but if I WAS, it was a wipe. So I sat myself out of the fight as often as possible. The very first Gorefiend kill we had, I was in on my hunter. I would feign death prior to his casts that would give you the debuff and so I was never targetted by his stupid ability. And I did pretty darn well in terms of DPS, too! But I did what I could to adapt to all the various mechanics and that was the one thing in all of Burning Crusade I just couldn’t adapt to.

It’s not a hard game, when you look at it. Don’t stand in bad stuff. DPS this when you’re supposed to, DPS this other thing when you’re supposed to. Heal who’s taking damage. Keep bad guys away from your raid.

That SO many people fail at these basics — I’m not even talking about things like interrupts or DPS classes dispelling things or any of that — makes me sooooo angry.

Don’t even get me started on people who fail at CCing or tanks who taunt to pull.

Kurn’s UpsetMeter: 9/10 (Very High)

– Failing Like Faily McFailerson. What makes me angrier than the above is when I fail at something. I am not perfect, I get caught by Blistering Cold on Sindragosa sometimes, I eat Fireball Barrage on Halfus sometimes. I make mistakes. What upsets me is when I CONSTANTLY fail at something. Take, for example, our Al’Akir work from the other week. Had no idea that you could delay the Wind Burst by taking Electrocute so that when the Wind Burst/Squall Line combo coincides at the MT’s location, it’s NOT freaking impossible. I ate Squall Line a zillion times that night before I wrote that post after the raid. And if it hadn’t been for Selyndia pointing out that Electrocute delays the Wind Burst, it never would have clicked and I would have ended up sitting myself on that fight.

What makes it different from Gorefiend? Gorefiend was a technical problem. My computer wasn’t phasing me quickly enough to allow me to complete the mechanics required for the fight. It sucked, but at least I knew I had done my best. With Al’Akir, it wasn’t a technical thing. I just could not figure out how to be right up in front for Wind Burst and simultaneously halfway out on the platform to eat the gap for Squall Line. It was so frustrating that I felt like a total failure. It upsets me greatly to fail constantly at the same mechanic without issues stemming from my computer. :P

Kurn’s UpsetMeter: 9.5/10 (Very High)

– Not being prepared. This relates to the above. Back in BC, there we stood, crafting last minute Shadow Resist gear for Mother Shahraz. And a rogue tells me she doesn’t have her Medallion of Karabor, that comes from the attunement quest. There’s more to the story (scroll down a long ways to get to the BC/Mother bit) but basically, I gave all the mats I was holding to one of the officers, made him raid leader and said to the raid that I was going afk for a few.

Right there in the middle of the raid.

I got up and punched the living crap out of my couch. I yelled into a pillow. I was SO angry that, even after all of that, I removed the rogue from the raid and instructed her to go back to Shattrath.

After months (MONTHS!!!) of posts and checking in with people about their attunement needs, their resist needs, we are finally at the fight we have been preparing for and this one dumbshit rogue is like “uh, I didn’t do the heroics” and had confused the attunement questline with the Champion of the Naaru questline. Despite the fact that I had taken two hours (TWO HOURS) one day to detail the ENTIRE questline on our forums and constantly reminded people to finish that up and let us know if they needed Al’ar or Rage or whatever.

I lost it. Dar calls it “the night Kurn drank the RED haterade”. I don’t think I’d ever lost my shit to that extent because of something someone did in-game before and I know I haven’t lost it to that extent since. I was SO angry.

Kurn’s UpsetMeter: 14.72/10 (RED HATERADE TIME)

There are other things — I hate when people leave my guild, I hate missing progression fights, I hate losing valuable members of the guild due to circumstances that are unavoidable. But I think the above really sums up what really upsets me when I play this game.

Earlier Today: People That You Admire
Tomorrow: Your desktop background (on your computer) and why you chose it