So I read over at Dwarven Battle Medic that Fannon is taking part in a blogging challenge that Saga of Spellbound came up with. I know I’ve been neglecting the blog lately, what with all kinds of other WoW obligations and some RL obligations too, so I figured at least this will get me to post daily. :)
Day 01 – Introduce Yourself
Hi, my name is Kurnmogh, but you can (and should) call me Kurn. Please do not call me Madrana, even though that’s the character I play on more often than not, nor any derivations thereof. Kurn is just fine, please and thank you.
I’m a female 30-something-year-old Montrealer who has been playing WoW since before I was in my 30s. I’m finishing up a sociology degree from a university here in Montreal and I do some contract work to do with web stuff, both design/coding and the online community aspect.
I’m the guild master and healing lead of Apotheosis, an Alliance raiding guild on the Eldre’Thalas (US) server and spend a lot of time healing in raids as a holy paladin. I still love my hunter to bits and pieces, though, but I realized at the start of Wrath that being a DPS doesn’t satisfy me the way playing a healer does.
I love to write in my spare time. Does this surprise the frequent visitors out there? I think I’m pretty much known for my absolutely epic-length posts (both blog and forum variety) possibly more than I am known for any paladin expertise I may hold. Sadly, I don’t get to do this as much as I’d like to, due to the aforementioned “guild master” title, but I am definitely a writer at heart.
I also watch a stupid amount of television, usually not at the same time as it actually airs. Current shows I’m watching weekly include, but are not limited to: Castle, How I Met Your Mother (a guild favourite!), V, Glee, The Big Bang Theory, Grey’s Anatomy, 30 Rock, Survivor: Redemption Island and I occasionally keep an eye on House and Desperate Housewives. I just finished watching Season 1 of Community and am trying to catch up on Season 2. I also catch as many Montreal Canadiens hockey games as possible, which is probably about 35% or so of them, primarily because they play a LOT of games on raid nights.
Anyways, I guess that’s sufficient for now! Much more and there won’t be a lot left for the next 19 days! :)
For those of you who don’t know, I’m a sociology student. I’m close to getting my bachelor’s degree and, with any luck, the upcoming fall semester of 2011 will be my last semester.
As such, I’m trying to figure out what I want to do with my life and I occasionally see a vocational counselor to try to help me narrow down the field.
Perhaps unsurprisingly to some, she was fascinated to hear about my involvement with WoW. I don’t tend to talk about it a lot “in real life”, but when I mentioned that something I loved doing was raid leading, she kind of had to ask what that meant and I had to explain and, yeah, she constantly tries to get me to relate things to WoW.
Once I get over the embarassment of it, it’s kind of neat, because she shows me why I love the game in a whole other way.
My “homework” for my next session is to write up a CV (or resume) of my GM skills. “Pretend,” she said, “that you need to apply to become the leader of another guild.”
“But that would mean my guild had failed miserably!”
She chuckled and told me to pretend I was six months removed from the pretend end of my guild and to try to write up a CV.
Obviously, the reason she’s doing this is to show me, in concrete terms, that the skills I have gained and refined while playing World of Warcraft have relevance in the real world. Which I know, but I rarely see real applications for it. I mean, how often do you have to parse a log in real life? How often do you have to armory people in real life? How often do you have to respec in real life?
My appointment’s in a little over two hours, so I thought I’d share with you guys what I wrote. Note that my Bronzebeard and Proudmoore guilds are not named because I’ve been pretty harsh on those people in this blog in the past.
Monday morning, I woke up and promptly recorded Episode Five of Blessing of Frost with Majik, which I need to edit after I do this post.
Then, I went out to meet Ophelie from The Bossy Pally and the Giant Spoon for coffee. She was in the area visiting friends and was kind enough to ask me if I wanted to hang out, so we settled on Monday afternoon. 48 minutes after I finished the podcast with Majik, I arrived at the coffee shop and just a couple of minutes later, Ophelie arrived.
We had a great chat — from Canada and Quebec and Newfoundland to TV shows, from holy paladin mechanics to guild stuff, from Matticus and Conquest to Oestrus and Apotheosis. ;) It was a good time!
FOUR hours later, I realized I needed to get going, so I hauled ass and got home in time for my officer meeting which lasted over two and a half hours. It’s our first of the expansion and we got ALL the EPGP crap ironed out by virtue of doing a random regular, which ended up being Stonecore. And we played with the loot mods through the instance.
I’m shocked that it took Daey almost two hours to make the “Why don’t we just frigging /roll for loot?” suggestion that he’s basically famous for. (He suggests it multiple times EVERY expansion and gets shot down… every single time.) I bust out laughing at it, though. It felt like I was home.
So we finished up with EPGP – decided what loot mods to use, precisely, worked out the figures for EP awards and then, the most miraculous thing happened.
Dar actually said she’d update the EPGP post on the forums (which basically had how we do loot organized, but very out of date and not complete — lacking details that we had JUST hammered out tonight).
I nearly fell over in shock. One of my officers. Volunteered. To write an official post on the guild forums. Why I didn’t make Dar an officer during Wrath, I don’t know, but I’m sure as hell glad she threw her name in the hat for Cataclysm!
So she updated and edited my original post, created a new thread, which I just added a couple of things to, then replied to and gave a couple of additional details on standby and such… and that was it for all the EPGP stuff! Ecstasy!
I’ve gone another check of the people who weren’t QUITE up to snuff on my weekend check and written to them, reminding them of what they’re missing. Mostly it’s just enchants that are lacking. I think almost everyone is at the appropriate ilvl of gear we’re requiring (338+) and the ones who are lacking enchants, I put on standby as a temporary measure to remind myself to check their missing enchants before I invite them to the raid tomorrow.
Tomorrow!!!!
The plan:
If we have Tol Barad, Baradin Hold to start with.
Then, Magmaw in Blackwing Descent. If the big worm dies, we go to Omnotron. If Omnotron goes down as well, it’s off to play with Halfus in Bastion of Twilight!
Why those bosses? We have experience, albeit limited, with all of those bosses, so the learning curve won’t be terribly steep. Hopefully.
Anyways, it’s 4:14am and I need to edit Blessing of Frost before I try to get some sleep and then write more stuff on the guild forums. Busy day on Tuesday!
I promise I’m not slacking on getting you all the new news from beta that I possibly can. It’s just that the servers have been down for 22 hours now.
Boy, I’m glad I went to bed last night…
Some things to note:
– Level cap to 85 (oh boy, more levelling, which means more screenshots)
– All instances (not heroics or raids, presumably) are going to be open
– Uldum and Twilight Highlands will be open
– Addons should be enabled
So… I’m going to be spending a fair amount of time on the beta trying to get to max level. I’ll do what I can to get into groups to see how healing is, but as it stands, I’m a little afraid.
At least I’ll hopefully have Grid and Clique? :) Cross your fingers that these aren’t broken. :P
In the future, I will have a write up of Blackrock Caverns (I need to finish that one, first), Stonecore (would like to do it a couple more times, I’ve only succeeded in it once) and the other instances, like the Throne of the Tides one I did.
In the meantime, I’ve gotten off my ass and spent this time working on the Apotheosis guild forums. Crazy that I don’t even have an 80 on the server my former guild was on and yet I’m doing guild paperwork…
Okay, so obviously, my brain wasn’t working when I wrote my Being a Woman who Raids post, because I forgot about some truly excellent bloggers who are women who are fairly progressed. So, ladies, let’s all work together and try to come up with a fairly definitive list of progressed female raiders who blog, shall we? Please leave a comment with your blog URL if you’d like to be listed (or someone else’s blog URL if you know they’re a progressed female raider) assuming you meet the requirements below. If the blog does not have the woman’s most-progressed raiding character’s armory profile listed on it, please include the armory link as well. (You can email me the armory link if you prefer: kurn [at] apotheosis-now [dot] com.)
I’ve populated the list with a few names and blogs already, but haven’t been able to verify progression in some other cases.
Requirements (may be subject to change, but we’ll start out with this):
1) The blogger must be at least 9/12 ICC HM (that’s 10 or 25, although if you’re doing 10, you shouldn’t be decked out in all 277 gear). This can mean that the blogger has reached that stage with her current guild or a previous guild. Please let me know what the progression is in the comment itself. (Note that I’ll take your 25m progression over 10m if you’re wearing lots of 277 gear.)
2) The blogger must be a woman. This means that the blogger should say somewhere (either a blog post or in the About section) that they are a woman. Gender of the character does not matter. ;) (I will also include self-identified MTF transgender individuals as female bloggers, should any exist, mostly because I’m inclusive in general, but also because my previous post was spawned in part by my annoyance with the male-dominated heteronormative narrative that exists in WoW.)
3) The blog should primarily be about WoW stuff. If your blog is mostly you talking about what movie you saw before you went off and spent a couple of hours in ICC, you won’t get listed. I’d really like for this to be a solid list of women who are progressed in this game and who really talk about the game on their blogs.
A proper submission:
Kurn of Kurn’s Corner (http://kurn.apotheosis-now.com), is 11/12 ICC 25 HM and here is her armory: (link)
Please note that this is not any kind of effort to be elitist or to snub women who may be less-progressed! This is really a sort of experiment to see how many women out there are progression raiders who blog about WoW to help me see if my initial theory was right or wrong. (I believed that the reason there weren’t, from what I could tell, a lot of progression-minded female raiders who blogged was because there weren’t that many progression-minded female raiders at all.)
Also, the 9/12 HM requirement is arbitrary, I know. I put it there because I feel that most raiding guilds can eventually get Lady Deathwhisper down on heroic (typically the 9th boss on heroic you’ll do) but that, for whatever reason, a raiding guild may struggle once they start banging their heads against the walls that Putricide and Sindragosa represent, even to the point of giving up and no longer raiding.
I have a feeling that this post may be updated fairly regularly. ;)
25-man Progressed Female Raiders who Blog
(Please note that progression listed below is for Icecrown Citadel 25-man hard modes.)
A lot of people have been blogging lately about sort of feminist topics. In particular, Ophelie’s post caught my attention. Not only did she link me (thanks!) but she linked me under “hardcore”. Oddly, “hardcore” is not how I would personally define myself, but that’s a blog entry for another day. (And I don’t take offense, I just find it a curious label. It should be noted that she’s actually changed that heading to read “PvE Progression Focused Female Players” now, though.) Also, I really liked Codi’s recent post about social privilege and WoW and Blizzard being a business.
So in the midst of all these posts (there are so many that I couldn’t possibly link all the ones I’ve read recently), I realized I had a lot of things to say. I don’t really talk much here about being a woman in this game or the strange reactions I get when it’s discovered that I AM, in fact, female, or how I deal with people’s reactions. I also haven’t spoken much about the lack of other capable women at high-end levels. This seems like a perfect time to address some issues and throw my own views out there.
I don’t have the time to talk about this right now, but I wanted to let you all know it’s eventually coming. I’ve got lots of thoughts jotted down in my draft and I’ll be posting that eventually.
What about, exactly?
Well, I have things to say about being a woman who raids, about how I’ve seen the decline of women around me as I’ve moved to more progressed guilds, about the lack of women as tanks and other stuff, including questioning why the Leggings of Concentrated Darkness look like this on a female toon and like actual slacks on a male toon. (Couldn’t find a screenshot of the men wearing them. Gee. I wonder why not?)
But, like I said, not right now. If you have any questions for me about being a female raider, leave them in the comments and I’ll be happy to address them in my upcoming post.
I know I usually post a lot on Tuesdays, but it’s a busy week and I have a lot to do! Dinner plans tonight, an appointment and raid tomorrow, afternoon/dinner plans on Thursday (thereby missing the raid), seeing my best friend and her little girl on Saturday, possibly going away for a couple of days…
Hope to post a fair bit this week despite the craziness going on, but if not, there are thousands upon thousands of words on this very blog for you to read through and a couple hours worth of videos on YouTube. Go forth and read/watch. :)
(To anyone who can tell me where that blog title is from, I will give you 100g if we’re ever on the same server.)
All right, folks. I am taking the weekend off, basically. I’m heading up to my parents’ country house with my parents, my brother and my grandmother and will endeavour to go canoeing, do some walking, do some reading in the sun (!) and do things like play silly card games or board games with my family.
I will be bringing my laptop up with me, but I will only have dialup access, which means:
– I will not be able to go through parses because the load time is insane.
– Email replies will not be as instantaneous as normal. ;)
– I will probably not blog.
– I will not be on twitter much, if at all.
– I will not be in-game pretty much at all, not on live or on beta.
I know. You’ll all miss me terribly between now and Sunday evening. I encourage you to go out and get some sun before summer’s over! Or, you know, if you’re in the southern hemisphere, feel free to keep surfing the Internet. I know that 3 degrees Celsius is chilly for you people. ;)
Have a great weekend, folks. Kurn’s Corner will resume content posting on Mondayish. :)
Hello, lovely people. It is Tuesday once again and, once again, I have had a ridiculously low number of search terms I haven’t covered, so, once again, the Q&A post will be put off. Can’t wait for people’s Internet use to go up again…
Anyways, I thought I’d update the ol’ blog with some, well, updates.
Beta:
You may have noticed I haven’t talked much about Beta in the last few days, not since I hit 83 and got Healing Hands.
Why haven’t I been talking about the Beta? Well, I’m kind of stuck.
Madrana’s 83, which is the level cap, so I don’t want to quest on her, since I’m not gaining any more experience. I would love to do instances like crazy, but the Random Dungeon Finder isn’t working unless you’re already in a group, apparently.
So I could go quest on Kurn, right? I’m only level 81 and 3/4. But the thing is, Kurn’s stuck on a bugged quest in Vashj’ir (Still Precious, if you’re curious — no naga currently drop the pearls!). I’d rather not skip the content in this sub-zone and move on, because I’m enjoying the feeling of completing the subzones and continuing this storyline. Again, can’t really do instances… I could go do Hyjal on Kurn, but I figure I’ll be doing Hyjal and Vashj’ir enough times on live when Cataclysm drops, so I’m just sort of waiting for Blizzard to fix a few things in a new build.
God, I hope they drop a new build soon. Like, today. Tomorrow. Yesterday…
Leadership:
I went to a private, all-girls’ school for eleven years, from Grade 1 through to Grade 11 (which is our last year of high school in Quebec). Somewhere along the way, somehow, I obtained these things called “leadership skills”. I was never, ever a leader back in school. I shied away from positions of authority, I never liked being the one people looked to for decisions or depended upon to make decisions.
But in every circumstance since my high school days, I have found myself gravitating to leadership positions whenever it’s clear that whoever is currently leading is not doing it well.
And you know, I’m not terribly bad at being a leader. I’m good at allocating resources, scheduling things, thinking inside the box and then outside when it’s required… Sadly, I’m one of the better leaders I’ve encountered out here in the real world. It kind of sucks, because I really don’t like being a leader.
What I prefer is to be led by a competent leader.
If the leader is not competent or if I am not being led appropriately (not being used to my full extent, not being given clear instructions, etc) then that’s when my leadership skills step in and want to usurp the leader’s position and just DO IT BETTER.
Why am I talking about this? Because it’s basically describing my leadership experiences in WoW.
How did I get to be a raid leader/officer back in my old, old guild? I asked questions, I educated myself and then I educated others on why, precisely, they wanted to do Zul’Gurub and Molten Core.
How did I get to be an officer/raid leader/healing lead back in Apotheosis? It’s because I took initiative to help form the guild, it’s because I knew Karazhan and I researched my ass off for Gruul and Mag and everything else. I had learned to allocate healing from my short stint in another guild and applied it to Apotheosis and that basically meant that I was just doing healing, period. And I was okay with that, because there just wasn’t anyone else I trusted at the start to do healing, except for our awesome priest officer, who was, unfortunately, MIA more often than not.
How did I get to be healing officer in my Bronzebeard guild? The healing lead (and GM) stepped down from raiding/playing altogether for a long while and I was the noisiest healer of the bunch, so they were like “HEY YOU! Here! Do healing!”. I wasn’t being led properly, so I became the leader.
How did I get to do healing for a period of like, 3 months through Sindragosa (reg), LK (reg) and 8/12 ICC25 HMs? My friend had basically deputized me before she took time off, but I still had to earn my “position” in that I was CONSTANTLY talking to the raid leader about healing and such. Why did I do it if it made me miserable? Because no one else was going to be able to do it, barring the RL, and having been a RL and healing lead at the same time, I basically don’t wish that upon anyone.
So it’s nice to be in a guild now where the leaders work hard. I might not always get a precise healing assignment, but I know I’m on the tanks. My healing lead listens to my feedback (and the feedback of others, I would imagine) and sometimes strats and assignments are tweaked. Sometimes they’re not. But at least I have an idea that he’s listening.
My GM is awesome, as you guys already know. I don’t envy her the position, nor the work and time and energy she puts into the guild. I’m sort of dreading being in that position with Apotheosis in a few months. I think I’ve learned a lot about the workings of guilds in the last year and a half, though. I always go into a guild with the attitude that I will be there forever (or at least until the end of the expansion) and, barring seriously bad conditions (continuously cancelled raids, abusive environment, etc), I WILL be there. While I’m in any guild, though, I find that I’m soaking up all the little things to do or not to do if (when) I find myself back in the position of GM.
Raiding:
Re-learning some of these fights with a new guild isn’t easy. My current guild is struggling on Putricide and I don’t really know why. I got caught by the Gas Cloud last night on one attempt and I was like “WHAT THE HELL?” because I NEVER get caught by that thing. I realized that it hadn’t been slowed. Sure, I wasn’t in an ideal position for the possibility of being targetted by it, but, by golly, I had a head start on the sucker!
So I mention to my GM that I’d been caught because it wasn’t slowed. She countered that I didn’t move fast enough/was in a bad place.
Of course, I looked up the logs.
[22:22:53.499] Gas Cloud’s Regurgitated Ooze fades
[19:22:55.251] Gas Cloud Gaseous Bloat Madrana 17373
[19:22:56.582] Gas Cloud hits Madrana Absorb (574)
Okay, so it only took it two seconds to catch up to me, but I was right; it wasn’t being slowed. My GM later mentioned that she was aware of the slowing issues but honestly thought I was right next to the Gas Cloud and that’s why I was hit. I maintain I’d have been able to get away since I was the second target and the thing should have been almost dead, but anyways. The point is that — the Gas Cloud was not being slowed.
Why?
The Abomination has a lack of energy.
Why?
Druids aren’t keeping Rejuv up for Revitalize procs, disc priest isn’t keeping PW:S up for Rapture procs.
But on the bright side, we’re doing less dying to Plague?
I don’t know, it was a tough reset, I guess. It feels like there are too many little mistakes being made by too many people, which includes me. I’ve eaten some Malleable Goo, I got hit by the Gas Cloud, I’ve died to Unbound Plague because I didn’t pass it off when I should have.
I’m learning that heroic Putricide is actually a lot harder than it was when I first learned it. It was an easy fight to learn for my last guild, but, for whatever reason, it’s a lot more challenging for this guild. I’m okay with that, and getting to P3 and getting him to 7% or thereabouts this reset was great. I just want that momentum to continue.
Anyways, that’s about all for my deep thoughts right now. Hopefully we’ll get something going on the Beta soon so I can post more.
And who knows, maybe a new Holy How-To soon, eh? It’s been over a month since my last one!
