Category: ramblings

Kurn's Q&A 23

Kurn / / healing, icecrown citadel, paladins, q&a, raiding, ramblings

Delayed a bit due to fatigue and epic Ruby Sanctum hilarity, here’s my Q&A for the week. I’ll probably wind up doing that form this week sometime or something.

First of all, thanks to all those who “retaliated” against Majik with the following search terms. You totally made my day, hahaha. :)

– why is kurnmogh such an amazing player?
– madrana is the best holy paladin ever
– kurn yeah but can majik heal?
– kurn majik may be able to tank but he still dies without heals
– kurn majik is just a dk they’re all noobs
– sometimes i close my eyes and wonder how i can be awesome like kurnmogh

And, my favourite, and thus, Question #1 this week:

1) kurn who the hell is majik?

My history with Majik dates back YEARS at this point. Honestly, truly, years. Majik was a frost mage who joined our guild back in something like mid-June of 2006.

My first-ever experience with this guy was during the Scourge Invasion of Patch 1.11. He basically said that he could solo all the non-elites guarding one of the Necrotic Shards or whatever.

I was like “yeah, RIGHT.”

He laughed, hit up Ice Barrier, mounted up, GATHERED THEM ALL UP, hit Frost Nova, blinked away and hit Blizzard until they all died.

Solo.

I didn’t do anything. Neither did our regular priest, Crypt (who had been in Majik’s prior guild, where Majik had been the GM) and neither did our warlock, Tia. We just stared at this nutcase in absolute shock and amazement.

A LEGEND WAS BORN. hahaha.

Majik quickly became one of our raid leaders in Zul’Gurub (and later instances as well) and eventually became an officer and he, along with Crypt, Tia, myself and a mage named Tandrace (whom we affectionately called Steve) all ended up doing the Tier 0.5 questline together. And thus started a beautiful friendship.

Highlights include, but are not limited to:

– “That was *spectacular*.” (Heard frequently, usually after a particularly hilarious and/or brutal wipe.)
– “Guys, guys, he’s trying to be sneaky, but I see him and oh God, he’s got a really big sword!” and other assorted quotes from the 11 minute vent lag spike in Dire Maul.
– “Tia, Tia, Tia.” (Chiding our warlock for not soulstoning us, even though she tried and there was no room in her bags and I traded her for her to trade me something and then SOMEONE got us into COMBAT and … yeah. No soulstone.)
– “Not the face, NOT THE FACE!” (Also heard frequently.)
– “I have a plan.” (The plan was for the five of us, with no tank, to jump down on to Venoxis’ platform and “take him from behind with the element of surprise!”. At level 60. We got Venoxis to 98% and considered that a victory.)
– “Hey Maj, pick up engineering.” (He did, spent easily 500g on it, and that was a LOT pre-BC, and got to 300 engineering overnight.)
– “Who’s up for a Venoxis run? C’mon guys, 20 minutes, you get rep, bijous, chance at loot!” (This was frighteningly commonplace, since we only ran ZG officially one day a week. Why did Majik want to do Venoxis? Just one reason: Fang of Venoxis. Along with his Tome of the Ice Lord, the Fang of Venoxis would make him super leet. My hand to God, until he got a better 1H elsewhere, he was using Hypnotic Blade, which drops off Arcanist Doan in Scarlet Monastery. Not even kidding. At all. We actually WENT BACK to SM to pick it up for him.)
– Many hours over Vent spent complaining about the idiocy of any moronic mage taking Arcane Fortitude. (It was Very Bad at the time.)
– Doing a Strat 45 run in 39 minutes with the following group:
* Kurnmogh + Whisper (Whisper, my cat, tanked. I was Marks, FYI.)
* Tandrace, Fire Mage
* Majik, Frost Mage
* Crypt, Holy Priest
* Tia, Destruction Warlock

Yeah. Again. No tank. At all. We actually did the 45 minute run in 39 minutes with no tank. We also did a Dire Maul North Tribute run more than once without a tank (I still feel bad for Tharivol) and did almost everything for our Tier 0.5 quests without a tank, only bringing one in for the special boss in Scholomance and then being in a regular 10-man group for the UBRS boss, nicknamed “Lord Whatshisnuts”. (By Tia.)

And that? THAT is just pre-BC!

In Burning Crusade, we’d disbanded our previous guild, gone our separate ways for the most part, but brought Apotheosis to life on June 1, 2007. Majik was the guy who bought the charter and was a core officer throughout BC, even though the jerk decided to, you know, GO TRAVELLING THROUGH EUROPE at the height of our Karazhan farming, where I was swapping people in and out on every. single. boss. I may not have forgiven him for leaving me with the raid leading duties then. ;)

He was our mage tank on Krosh (and, as freaking usual, I was his healer), he would always put down a Brewfest Pony Keg after Maulgar was down. He did, in fact, Blink into Gruul once while explaining the fight. He once got bounced/feared OUT of Magtheridon’s room during the encounter and basically /danced at us.

He wasn’t there for a Vashj kill of ours, which is probably my biggest regret. Of everyone in the guild who deserved Hand of A’dal, Majik was at the top. But he’d been taking some time off, dealing with school (?) or work (?) and though we TRIED, we couldn’t get Vashj down on this one night that Maj was there. He missed out on the first Kael’thas kill as well, but was the jackass responsible for our setting foot in Hyjal.

Picture it. Sunday, April 27th, 2008. My dad’s birthday had been a couple days earlier and the birthday dinner was that Sunday. I wasn’t there for the officer meeting, I was going to be very late for the raid…

I log on.

I get an invite to the raid group.

They’re in Mount Freaking Hyjal.

22-manning Winterchill waves.

They summon me IN THE MIDDLE OF WAVES and I promptly crash because my computer sucks so bad.

We spend an hour or so working on Rage Winterchill and get him down, Apotheosis-style. With only 24 people.

Thanks to Majik, who decided to go screw around in Hyjal since we were short people, we were able to start working on T6 content while trying to get Vashj and Kael.

Maj was solid in T6 content and we couldn’t have gotten through Hyjal and BT without him.

God, I haven’t even mentioned that he spearheaded the charge against Zul’Aman in our guild. He had an awesome team and they cleared ZA.

These days, Maj is playing a DK and levelling his priest with my brother and me and, as per usual, I’m healing his ass, more often than not. ;)

So… Majik has been a key part of my WoW experience, I don’t just mean “that guy from pre-BC”. I mean someone who has been there with me through Vanilla, BC and now Wrath. I mean someone who has always brought a positive attitude to a raid. I mean someone who has sat there, for hours, helping out mages or other DPS with their spec or gems or enchants. I mean someone who basically weaseled out of being the GM of Apotheosis by virtue of breaking his word to me. (Our GM, Toga, stepped down and Majik and I decided we’d both throw our names in the hat and so I said I’d consider doing it and then Majik was the first to say “GRATS!!!” and I was like “You bastard.”) This guy has one of the best senses of humour ever and I still crack up to the point where I can’t breathe when he gets on a roll. You should have seen him bitching me out IRL, in an Internet cafe here in Montreal, telling me that “Conjured Glacier Water” doesn’t just appear out of thin air. That he has to go to the goddamn Glacier himself, that he has to chip ice into a container and warm THAT and then bring it out when some bitchy “WATER PLZ” person like MY ignorant, needy ass starts griping.

No kidding, I nearly fell out of my chair. In public. Couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see for the tears rolling down my cheeks. It was hilarious.

We tease each other to death, insult each other constantly, but it’s all an act. We know that we can rely on each other, we trust the other knows their class and the encounter. We know we can defy all odds together. And it’s that kind of exuberance, enthusiasm and optimism that Majik brings to every single raid encounter. He’s the “YEAH LET’S DO THIS EVEN THOUGH WE DON’T HAVE A CHANCE!!!!!” person to my “Are you out of your goddamn mind?” attitude.

I like this game, a lot. I’ve played it for a long time. You know how people say it’s the other people they’ve met that keep them playing? Majik is probably the key person for me. I won’t even TRY to reform Apotheosis without him on board. I wouldn’t even consider it.

So. That’s who Majik is. (And no, we’re not dating or anything and no, there’s no interest. Trust us. I only bring it up because someone in Apotheosis once thought we were married to each other and I thought I’d head THAT off at the past.)

2) bol dont beacon my tank macro

While mechanically, this is pretty easy:

#showtooltip
/cast @target Beacon of Light
/ra Beacon of Light on %t, don’t beacon my tank!

(or something like that – I’m not a macro god!)

I’m curious as to why you’d want a macro like that. Just call out who you’re beaconing or get your healing lead to assign beacons, etc. Also, sometimes two beacons is actually useful. Best example of this is a third tank on, say, Marrowgar. One pally each on two tanks and then both beacons on the third tank. Or both beacons on the mobile tank on Blood Prince Council. Or both beacons on the kite tank on Rotface.

3) can i do dungeons with my friends with real id

No, right now the functionality is restricted to chatting. However, I believe that Blizzard is planning to remove the battlegroup restrictions for Cataclysm, so even if you and your buddy are on two different battlegroups (say, Reckoning and Bloodlust), you should be able to both queue for heroic Oculus or something stupid that no one else wants to do, and be put into a group together. It might even be more intuitive than that. We’ll have to see. :)

4) dealing with infest heroic lich king

Probably the best way (on 25m) is two disc priests. Split up the raid, spam PW:S on your targets. Done. Hopefully. Remember that since it hits SO much harder on heroic that you probably won’t even need to downrank it to ensure Rapture procs.

5) did heroic modes in icc drop only heroic mark

Heroic end-wing bosses in ICC (Saurfang, Putricide, Blood Queen Lana’thel and Sindragosa) all drop ONE heroic token each. And for some reason, it’s almost always Vanquisher. :P Short of heroic Lich King, these four are the only way to get a heroic token. The end-wing bosses will also drop TWO regular marks on heroic.

6) do yellow gems count for spell hit

Yes, Rigid King’s Amber counts for both physical hit and spell hit. Both types of hit (and haste) were combined in Wrath of the Lich King.

7) gearscore is 4626. what should my dps be?

Your gearscore doesn’t matter. IF your gear is properly enchanted and gemmed, IF you’re specced and glyphed properly, IF your chosen pieces of gear are appropriate to your class and spec… IF all of those things are okay, then you should be doing DPS at least equivalent to what your gearscore is. I noticed that when I hit 5k GS on Kurn (properly enchanted/etc/etc/etc) that that was when I could pull 5k DPS under good conditions.

Don’t worry about gearscore. Worry about what’s appropriate for your class and spec. Gearscore can be thrown off by a dozen different factors and, *at its very best* only serves as a marker for potential. That’s it. It’s what you do with gear that’s appropriate that matters.

Read about this “tank” with a very high gearscore, which meant nothing.

8) harvest soul lich king mass dispel

I’m pretty sure you cannot dispel, mass or otherwise, Harvest Soul.

9) terenas menethil clique

I don’t think that’ll work. What I’ve been doing is actually targetting him and hitting my 3 button (Holy Light) and 4 button (Cleanse). You could try making him a focus and clique-casting on your focus frame, though.

Edit — Whoops, my bad. I was primarily thinking about how he doesn’t show up on Grid. I have my Clique set up so that my Grid frames (and my focus frame) are the ONLY active frames, period, that my Clique works with, since I have bound stuff to right-click. If you right-click on your own unit frame to leave a party, or right-click to do any number of things on your target frame, and your Clique is enabled for those frames and you have something bound to right-click, you can’t bring up the context menu.

So having said that, if your Clique is enabled on your target frame, absolutely, go to town.

I forgot until just now that I had my focus frame Clique-enabled. Guess who’s gonna focus Terenas next time she’s inside Frostmourne? That’s right, this lady.

10) world of logs triggered shadow trap?

Well, apart from seeing who took damage from it, you don’t really know who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. There’s no trigger for it listed in the logs that I can see. Sorry! :( Maybe one day, the Shadow Traps will be as vocal about who triggered them as Yogg-Saron’s clouds are now. ;)

Hilarity and Halion

Kurn / / facepalm, healing, raiding, ramblings, ruby sanctum

So, as it’s Tuesday, I met a friend for a late breakfast, we went to see a movie (Iron Man 2, which was definitely worth the $6.75), we wandered and chatted and then I came home to discover that, as per usual, Blizzard and I don’t agree on things and Ruby Sanctum is open.

I was asked to go heal for my new guild when I logged on to do my transmutes, but I’d just walked in and was supposed to do a few Ahunes with my brother and Majik over on Proudmoore.

Maj, my brother and I actually ended up doing the weekly (twice on two toons each) and then when I told them that Ruby Sanctum was up… that’s all they wanted to do.

I’ll get into details on the fight in a post tomorrow or something, but can I just say that it was a HILARIOUS raid, even though we didn’t down Halion?

Maj was on his DK, tanking. My brother (whom we call Fog or Foggy) was pressed into service on his rarely-used hunter because his paladin, while able to solo-tank Anub’Rekhan, would have been smushed into itty bitty little bite-sized morsels of dragon food if he had tried tanking in Ruby Sanctum. I… was on my resto shaman. My poor, neglected, rusty old resto shaman.

We pugged seven people: another resto shammy and a holy paladin (a poorly specced, not optimally geared paladin which, to be honest, made me want to cry a bit) to make three healers. We had another paladin tank (who tended to forget about Righteous Fury), a shadow priest, a mage, a warlock and a fury warrior. So five DPS, 3 healers, 2 tanks. Might have been a little conservative on our parts, but hey, we strongly suspected it might not be a faceroll kind of instance.

We went to the right first, killing trash and getting the hang of the first miniboss, Saviana Ragefire.

We wiped a few times on her, since people weren’t watching the BIG FLASHING ARROW THINGS when they had the Conflag debuff. We learned very quickly that conflag is BAD and you want to make sure those people gtfo of the raid and away from each other.

I think it was on our fourth try on Saviana Ragefire that the warrior, mage, shadow priest, warlock and paladin tank all died. And we kept going. That’s right. Three healers, the tank and one DPS — my brother.

HILARIOUS.

We got it done, too. Took something like 14 minutes, because I KNOW I used Mana Tide twice. After about 10 minutes, I realized three things:

1) I had no mana potions. At all. I actually had to trade my brother, while in combat, for the one Runic Mana Potion he had.

2) My mana regen on the shaman SUCKS.

3) Waiting about three seconds before being able to cast even Lesser Healing Wave sucks a LOT.

But we did it! It was great!

We didn’t invite the puggers to Vent, but rather me and Maj and Fog were all on my Vent together. It was so damn funny to hear Majik yelping when his health would be low or to hear him yelling at the pugs (who couldn’t hear him, obviously) to GTFO of the raid. “Run, run, RUN YOU FUCKERS, RUN!” was just one example of that. We really got into a nice rhythm that probably no one else ever should have to be in for as long as we were, but it worked out really nicely and I re-evaluated my opinion of the failish paladin because at least they knew how to run away from the rest of the raid when they have a HUGE red arrow on their HEAD.

It was somewhere around the 11 minute mark when I realized that my paladin instincts had failed me again. I didn’t have Earthliving Weapon on. Whoopsiedoodle.

But better yet, I believe that it was AFTER the fight that my brother says, on Vent, “Guys? I, uh, I might have possibly done all that without Aspect of the Dragonhawk on.”

Then we went towards Baltharus the Warborn.

This guy kicked our ass all over the Ruby Sanctum. I have no idea how many times we wiped on him. Let me see if I can glean this information from the logs.

Ouch. Seven wipes on him.

We lost the shadow priest after the fourth wipe, who “disconnected”, and replaced him with… another shadow priest. Who was much more good natured, too.

The issue was that our paladin tank wasn’t picking up the clone properly or that the blast wave right before the split was throwing a healer or a tank completely OOR. We had people die to melee hits from the clone, we had people die from being OOR or out of LOS… We also had people too close to each other so that mark thing was splashing to others. Took us 4-5 attempts to figure out it’s a lot like Boiling Blood on Saurfang. I vaguely recall being incredibly thankful that we’d gone for the mage instead of a rogue we’d been considering inviting. Apart from AB and food and stuff, the rogue would have died as frequently as the poor warrior did from AOE on the melee.

After the seventh wipe, I was like “Okay, guys. We’ve been here for a fairly long time, so we’ll give it two more attempts and then call it for the night and maybe try to set something up later this week.”

Apart from anything else, I was POOR and couldn’t afford the repairs. I was sincerely not prepared for a raid on the shammy, hahaha.

Well, we walked in and while we lost the warrior and actually lost the prot pally, we got Baltharus down. AWESOMESAUCE.

We investigated the Ruby Sanctum, as per the quest Krasus at Wyrmrest had us do, turned it in and decided to see what Zarithrian was like.

God bless Tremor Totem.

The sunder debuff on the tanks suck, the fear sucks, the adds suck, but we one-shot the bastard because WE WERE AMAZING. Ahahaha.

And then we decided to take a look at Halion himself.

We only did two attempts on him, but had a good time of it. We blew hero at the start on the second attempt now that we knew to expect crazy fire shit dropping from the sky and actually got into P2 and all zoned into the shadow realm. THE DEATH BEAMS ARE HILARIOUS. Oh my God, I haven’t laughed so hard on a wipe in a REALLY long time.

Anyways, we called it and plan to go back sometime this week to finish it off. With any luck, I’ll have done it on the pally by then.

Man, too much fun. I really miss raiding at all with Majik. And my brother, for that matter. :)

Pug Tales of Fail

Kurn / / dps, facepalm, lfg, ramblings

So I was on my priest earlier today, with my brother on his paladin who was ret, and a friend of ours was on his warrior, tanking. We did the random heroic and it was The Nexus.

In our party was Sellursoul, a warlock from Caelestrasz.

Within the first 30 seconds of the run, I knew it was going to be unpleasant. Sellursoul soulstoned… him or herself.

I said nothing.

We get to the first boss, the Horde Commander. Not only is the warlock standing right up there with the melee, not only that, but the warlock then gets feared (as one does by that guy)… into four mobs on the far side.

I see him in trouble. I wisely elect to let him die rather than pull aggro.

He dies.

He pauses.

HE USES THE SOULSTONE.

Pops up again.

Dies. Again.

All while the actual boss fight is still in progress.

He then releases. And apparently cannot find the entrance, because after the boss and the four adds died (someone else got feared — lesson; tell our tanking friend to pull him back), he was STILL a ghost.

I rezzed him. We moved on.

He is not particularly horribly geared. 5/5 T9 232. I have no idea what warlock specs are supposed to look like, but he seems to be destro and has fire-type glyphs. Haste and hit and crit all seem low to me, but again, I’m not a warlock.

He did precisely 799 dps to the caster boss for less total damage to her than the tank.

WTF.

Moving on.

I make a bet with my brother and our tank that dipshit, as I was referring to him, would pull adds jumping off the platform to the ground.

Neither took the bet, and it’s good for them, because I was right.

It was at about this point that I finally let the warlock have it in party.

“Your imp pulled those adds,” I said. “How do you have that gear and not know how to leave your pet behind on stay or dismiss it?”

No response.

“And you soulstoned YOURSELF instead of the healer. And used it right after you died, whereupon you died immediately AGAIN.”

No response.

“Do you know how to play this game at all?”

No response.

I tried to vote-kick and was informed by the lovely in-game mechanism that I have to wait another 15 minutes for a kick.

ARE YOU KIDDING ME?

We’d already BEEN in a group with this moron for 15 minutes. And now we couldn’t kick him for another 15?

We do Anomolous. Whereupon the warlock doesn’t touch the adds, and continues casting at the boss when shielded.

We do Ormorok and does the warlock dismiss his pet or set him on stay? No. Thank goodness pets despawn on that jump since they get too far away from their owners. I chewed him out about that, too.

And then he pulls the last Ancient as we leave that section.

Seriously?

Finally, we get to Keristrasza. He proceeds to die with 12, count them, TWELVE stacks of the debuff on him, despite my awesomeness in mass dispelling Frost Nova.

I /sighed at him and left the dungeon at the end. I didn’t even rez him. I gave him ample opportunity to show he has a CLUE about his class and the game (in fact, that had been his third run through heroic Nexus, according to the armory) and he failed every single time.

So when game developers tell us that people are “too good” at this game, I say bullshit. There is an ever-widening divide between “good players” and “bad players” and even if I don’t have the foggiest idea how to play a warlock or a rogue or a DK or a warrior, I bet you 10,000 gold that I wouldn’t wipe my party with my mistakes and I probably wouldn’t die like a moron three times in the Nexus, either.

Ultimately, trying to help smart, motivated people close the gap between “good” and “bad” is why I write about holy paladins and other various things. It’s really up to the community to teach people how to play this game, because Blizzard is under the mistaken impression that EVERYONE CAN PLAY. Everyone CANNOT. It is increasingly rare to find DPS in a random who can’t out DPS a semi-geared (ie: 232s and a couple 245s) tank. It is increasingly rare to find a healer who knows how to play even the basics of their class. It is increasingly rare to find a tank who can hold aggro and understands the basics of threat.

I resent Blizzard’s conclusion that the players are all good. They’re not. Most of them, most of the eleven million people who play this game are not just “not good” but actively “bad”. And now I have to wait thirty minutes through potential wipes thanks to morons before I can kick someone?

Next time, I’m just dropping group. I know that the kick delay is now based on our behaviour, but a 30 minute delay (the default, I’m guessing?) is literally more time than the whole instance takes if all goes well. I am not going to sit there in a run where someone is going to die despite my best attempts to keep them alive, or risk our group’s health because they were too dumb to control their pet.

That’s bullshit. Blizzard is way, WAY out of touch with how the majority of eleven million people play and they’re punishing those of us who DO know how to play by making us sit there for 30 minutes babysitting these morons who, five years into the game, don’t understand something as basic as a soulstone or pet pulls or move when you have a stacking debuff.

And now, much as I’d like to continue to bitch, I need to grab food before my raid.

Failadins ahoy!

Kurn / / facepalm, gear, paladins, ramblings

I cannot believe how many paladins out there on wowlemmings, or even those applying to my guild, are using this piece of crap libram:

Libram of Veracity

This libram is good for ONE encounter in ICC. One. That is the Valithria Dreamwalker encounter. For that, it’s downright awesome. I still haven’t spent any emblems on it, but I should probably get around to it. (I still have Libram of the Resolute for my Valithria set.)

I have to really insist that any Holy Light style holy paladin use Libram of Renewal. It doesn’t matter that its item level is 200. Let me say that again in words that some paladins who may be less theorycraft-oriented may better understand:

Your Gearscore doesn’t matter.

You remember back last month? When I was all like “What I Look For in a Holy Pally App“? Remember how I was complaining about things like the head and shoulder enchant choices and there was all this debate about mp5 vs crit?

Yeah.

I WISH that was all I had to complain about. There’s this one app who is wearing, I kid you not, three frost resistance pieces, gemmed straight up intellect with a Nightmare’s Tear, using the Libram of Veracity, specced 51/2/18, misses out on Imp LOH, Imp BoW (for 3/3 Imp Conc Aura), misses out on Imp BOM for Imp Judgements, is glyphed for Seal of Light and Flash of Light and yeah, did I mention the FROST RESISTANCE GEAR? It’s gemmed with +20 or +34 intellect, too. It’s like… hi. You fail in so many ways that it might be fun to pick you apart if looking at your armory didn’t make me want to claw my eyes out.

(Edit: He actually has Rot-Resistant Breastplate, Belt of the Lonely Noble and Recovered Reliquary Boots… but still only has 491 haste. Gah. Oh, and he’s withdrawn his app.)

What I think is going on is all these people have rolled paladin alts because they reason that finding a guild as a healer is going to be easier than as a DPS.

So they go out and try to gear themselves.

And they’re doing it Wrong ™.

They reason “hey, this is a holy libram! It’s ilvl 245! It’s available for 25 Emblems of Triumph! This must be awesome!”

And it’s not.

They reason “hey, people won’t take me on their runs if my GS is too low so I should get anything over ilvl 200 that I possibly can, even if the stats are awful!”

And they’re wrong.

They figure that anything with spellpower on it, particularly if it’s plate, MUST be good for them, regardless of all the other stats and how all the stats work together.

And they’re still wrong.

I was so frustrated by seeing all this failure that I was going to do a Holy How-To on how to appropriately gear a holy paladin who’s just hit 80, but then I remembered that Codi at Moar HPS had already done a post like that this last week!

<3 Codi

Most of the pieces have goodly amounts of haste on them. Listen to her, folks. She’s smart.

I guess what really boggles me the most about all this is that the most recent app I described says, and I’m not kidding, “I look in forums, healing sites, pally sites” when asked how he researches his class.

What <insert long string of expletives here> sites recommend ANY of the crap he’s wearing!? Or his spec? Or his glyphs?

This is really what spurs me into writing stuff on the blog. If there are bad holy paladin sites out there, I need to put my crap out there to counteract all that awful influence. :P

The problem with Real ID

Kurn / / facepalm, general, patches, ramblings

The problem with Real ID is not necessarily that it violates people’s privacy by linking their real name to people their Real ID friends know, although that sucks.

The problem with Real ID is that it has created a significantly awkward social situation.

Real ID has been out for all of a day and a half. How many people have you actually accepted or become Real ID friends with? How many have requested it of you? How many people have you requested it from?

Before I had even patched my client, I had requests (via other methods of communication) from my buddies Euphie, Shadowcry, Osephala and Carmentes.

I love them to death, but I am not Real ID friends with them and I won’t be unless this “feature” gets a lot more refined.

How does this make my buddies feel? Well, I can’t imagine it made them feel GOOD. These are people I’ve raided with — for practically four years, in the case of Shadow — and people I really like and respect. And they’re all excited about swapping IDs and then they find out that their former GM and/or healing lead isn’t going to friend them?

Frankly, I’d be pissed if I were any of them, and I appreciate the understanding they’ve shown after I explained my reasons to them. I’d STILL be pissed. ;)

I can understand Blizzard. They want to keep us playing, so what they’re trying to do is move us to communicate within their framework. They think it’s super easy to use and convenient. They know that people play a variety of Blizzard games and want us to be able to talk to each other across those platforms.

This is not bad. This is actually pretty cool. I’m all for convenience and easy communication and honestly, I enjoy the idea of chatting with my brother on Proudmoore while I raid on Skywall. It was actually a fun thing to do while I was in ICC 25 last night.

What is bad is that people aren’t thinking about the consequences. I’m seeing people in my new guild throw around their email addresses in a flurry. I love my new guild, but I don’t know them terribly well and I DEFINITELY don’t want most of them to know my “real life” name and identity at this point. Shit, they’ve found this blog and I was totally unprepared for that. :P Not only that, but do I really want my new guild to be able to find me on Proudmoore or something? Not particularly. If I’m on Proudmoore instead of Skywall, it’s because I’m doing something ON PROUDMOORE. I have five 80s there. I have things to do! :)

And yet, there’s this social pressure — not necessarily with my own guild, but I’ve had hints of it there — to friend everyone you’re friends with in WoW.

Apart from the fact that this completely redefines “friend”, it puts anyone unwilling to jump on that bandwagon in a very awkward situation.

How do you tell people you truly like and whose presence you enjoy in your raid that you don’t want them to know about your alts? How do you tell these same people that you don’t want to share your real name with them? Or your real email address with them? Or the names of YOUR friends?

There are three answers.

1) You tell them straight-out that you don’t want to be Real ID friends with them. This is hard to hear and I swear it’s harder to say. But it sucks for both individuals.

2) You tell them that you’re reserving Real ID friend use to a very small group of people; likely people you actually HAVE met IRL, whose real names you already know and use and that’s it. This is what I’ve chosen to do because it’s TOO COOL to be able to chat with people on other servers while I raid.

3) You don’t tell them how you feel and, instead, get peer-pressured into using Real ID when you’re actually a little hesitant or uncomfortable.

Why has this happened? This has happened because geeks have a problem with social niceties.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m very geeky. I really think that I am that rare kind of person who can understand where geeks are coming from and translate their behaviour to non-geeks and vice-versa. I understand both the geeks and the non-geeks.

The geeks see it like this, I’m thinking:

“Man, I wish I could talk to Majmaj while he’s playing SCII and I’m wiping in heroic ICC25.”

Which leads to: “Hey, if I built a system that was common to both and I used email addresses as the actual destination/recipient identifier but used the name linked to the account as the name representing the email address, that could be done! Oh my God, how cool would that be?!”

And then, being geeks, they CAN create that system. So they do. Voila, hello, Real ID. How’re you doing?

Being geeks, however, they have completely ignored the social niceties required in a situation like this.

The social niceties required are as follows, in my not-remotely-humble opinion:

– a character privacy scale: let the person see all your characters (as it presently is) or certain characters only, where you would get a list of all your toons and select the ones they could see.

– a RL privacy scale: let the person see your full real name (as it presently is) or just your first name.

– a Real ID friends privacy scale: let the person see all your Real ID friends’ names (as it presently is) or select which friends you want them to be able to see through you.

– a self-Real ID friends privacy scale: allow yourself to be visible (as it is now) or hidden to Real ID  friends of YOUR Real ID friends.

– a self-privacy setting: allow yourself to be visible to all your friends when online (as it is now) or just visible to those on the same server as the specific character you’re on. (The way the old friends setting used to work.)

The privacy creep is on, people. I’m not trying to be an alarmist, but when people I don’t know can see that I’m a Real ID friend of someone else, that’s not really cool by me. Doesn’t matter if they can’t link me to my toons or servers within the interface itself; I don’t want to share my name with a lot of people.

In all, I think Real ID, as it’s currently implemented, is a FANTASTIC groundwork for inter-server/inter-game communication. Long overdue, if you ask me. This all works okay, but that’s all.

The geeks have neglected to take into account how people will want to use this and how awkward it might be if people choose not to. They haven’t considered how this will force some people to redefine what “friend” means. Worse, they haven’t considered how this will force some people to EXPLAIN what their definition of “friend” is to some people who don’t make the cut.

I’m sure that the flurry of posts and comments about Real ID will subside soon enough and that within a month or so, no one will really care if you friend them that way or not.

But on launch? Boy, does this have the potential to be ugly.

Kurn's Q&A 22

Kurn / / addons, alchemy, blogging, classes, dungeons, facepalm, gear, general, healing, icecrown citadel, paladins, professions, q&a, raiding, ramblings

Good evening, or perhaps good morning! Had a lovely Tuesday, including dinner with the family at my parents’ house, then got to login and play with the new chat features a little bit. Again, as stated before, please don’t be offended if I choose not to include you in my Real ID network. I feel that the tools they give us are still rather clunky and not remotely refined enough for my tastes to consider sharing with people I don’t already know in real life.

Having said that, BOY HOWDY, do we have a bunch of interesting terms this week! You’d think someone had been BORED TO DEATH at work or something! As such, starting this week, I’ll have an anonymous form for questions you’d like to ask me for this Q&A-style post. Look for it on Wednesday or Thursday.

In the meantime…

I clearly made a mistake last week when I said:

“I like seeing myself in search terms. It’s cute.”

1)

kurnmogh, why is majik the best tank?
kurnmogh, how did majik redefine the mage class and why was he so good?
kurnmogh sucks and majik rules
why is kurnmogh just not as good as majik at wow?

And my personal favourites:

how come kurn can only play any given class in world of warcraft just about half as well as majik?
how has kurnmogh played and lived in the shadow of majik for so long?

Let’s tackle these burning questions individually.

1a) Majik is the best tank because he is a stupidly good player. It’s like he’s an idiot savant.

1b) Majik was key in redefining the mage class because he was frost and he was competitive DPS through ’till Hyjal. His approach to playing his mage was one that involved using Billy, the water elemental, to his full extent, making sure to be hit-capped and generally not dying to stupid things. However, it should be noted that, while still drunk from the traditional pony keg booze after Maulgar, Majik did blink into Gruul, causing a wipe. He was so good because, as previously noted, Majik is an idiot savant when it comes to the World of Warcraft. It also helped that he was a meter whore throughout the ENTIRETY of Burning Crusade and this drove him to swap to an Arcane/Frost rotation which meant that he was constantly Arcane Explosioning on Hyjal waves. Like a tool. Sure, his numbers were huge, but I do believe he started dying more frequently at this point, which had a negative effect on his overall DPS.

1c) We’ll pair the next two together, as they’re essentially the same. It’s true, dear readers, I am not as good as Majik is at WoW. I just don’t have the instincts that he does when it comes to, well, basically anything. Majik is ten times better at this game than I am and doesn’t have this habit of forgetting to do things like pop class-specific cooldowns the way I do. (Nature’s Swiftness? What’s that?)

1d) My favourite questions! Hooray!

– Majik has four level 80s and is working on his fifth. The classes are: mage, druid, shaman and death knight. Kurn has six level 80s and they are: hunter, paladin, shaman, mage, druid, priest. As you can see, there’s some overlap. Majik’s hunter is in his 40s, Majik’s highest paladin toon still would get beat down by Hogger and Kurn hates death knights in general, so the comparison is really versus each other when it comes to a mage, a druid and a shaman.

– Given that Majik raided full-time on his mage for years, that’s not a fair comparison. This leaves us with two alts, the druids and the shaman. I fully agree I can only play the druid and shaman half as well as Majik can. Why? This is largely because I have spent all my time really focused on the paladin and the hunter.

– Thus, while I fully admit I can’t play a mage, druid or shaman as well as Majik, due in part to my not being an idiot savant, if he wants to try to level up his hunter or paladin to get a good comparison going, he is welcome to do so.

– As to living in his shadow, I’ve got to say that it was cold there in his shadow, to never have sunlight on my face. I was content to let him shine, that’s my way. I always walked a step behind. So he was the one with all the glory, while I was the one with all the strength. I wonder if he knows that I’m really his hero or everything he wishes he could be? Clearly, I am the wind beneath his wings.

Now that I’ve learned from my lesson regarding search terms, let’s move on!

2) unbound plague ticks damage

Here’s a parse of a mage in the raid having Unbound Plague for 10 seconds before passing it off:

[23:34:40.353] Mage afflicted by Unbound Plague from Professor Putricide
[23:34:41.515] Professor Putricide Unbound Plague Mage Absorb (999)
[23:34:42.459] Professor Putricide Unbound Plague Mage Absorb (1249)
[23:34:43.463] Professor Putricide Unbound Plague Mage Absorb (1561)
[23:34:44.410] Professor Putricide Unbound Plague Mage 1410 (A: 541)
[23:34:45.424] Professor Putricide Unbound Plague Mage 2439
[23:34:46.359] Professor Putricide Unbound Plague Mage 3049
[23:34:47.507] Professor Putricide Unbound Plague Mage 3811
[23:34:48.433] Professor Putricide Unbound Plague Mage 4764
[23:34:49.354] Professor Putricide Unbound Plague Mage 5955
[23:34:50.399] Professor Putricide Unbound Plague Mage 7444

Here’s me in the same raid for 11 ticks:

[23:37:09.981] Professor Putricide Unbound Plague Madrana 681  (A: 289)
[23:37:11.135] Professor Putricide Unbound Plague Madrana 1212
[23:37:11.978] Professor Putricide Unbound Plague Madrana 1254 (A: 261)
[23:37:13.153] Professor Putricide Unbound Plague Madrana 1895
[23:37:13.965] Professor Putricide Unbound Plague Madrana 2368
[23:37:15.331] Professor Putricide Unbound Plague Madrana 2960
[23:37:15.877] Professor Putricide Unbound Plague Madrana 3701
[23:37:17.203] Professor Putricide Unbound Plague Madrana 4626
[23:37:17.827] Professor Putricide Unbound Plague Madrana 5782
[23:37:19.300] Professor Putricide Unbound Plague Madrana 7227
[23:37:19.964] Professor Putricide Unbound Plague Madrana Absorb (9034)

So you can get an idea of the damage: it starts out very low and ramps up hugely. The damage it does isn’t too bad, but if someone with Plague Sickness gets it, that damage is increased by 250%.

3) any new way to cheat unbound plague

Well, I don’t condone cheating. Are you talking about better plague visibility now that AVR and AVRE have been broken? If so, you may want to look into using HudMap:

http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/hudmap.aspx

4) dbm mark vengeful shade

Okay, here’s the problem with Vengeful Shades; they’re not able to be targetted. That means you can’t click on them to mark them, you can’t hit V and see their health bars. You just have to watch for them when they spawn and run the hell away.

5) does feign death work on frozen orbs on toravon

Yes.

6) elixir mastery will double flasks?

Okay, let’s explain this again.

As an alchemist, you get this fun thing called “Mixology” which doubles all elixir and flask *durations* and increases their effects slightly.

In order to have the *possibility* to proc extra flasks, you must be an elixir-specced alchemist, that is an Elixir Master. This will not proc all the time. This will not double your haul. This happens approximately at a 10% rate from what I’ve noticed. So for every ten flasks you make, you will roughly get one extra.

7) how many people go into frostmourne on 25 lk

On normal, this is one at a time, approximately once a minute throughout the final phase when he casts Harvest Soul on someone. On heroic, EVERYONE goes into Frostmourne.

8) lightning-infused leggings worth it

I recently crafted mine, replacing the heroic Legplates of Failing Light. After looking at the Ruby Sanctum loot tables at MMO-Champion there are NO new legs being added. That means that there are no legs higher than ilvl 264 with haste on them. So yes. Definitely worth it for any holy paladin.

9) server transfer raid lockout

It all gets cleared. I had done my daily random heroic before I transferred my paladin. Then I transferred and ran another — none were barred from me, and I also got 2 extra Emblems of Frost by virtue of doing another “first” random.

10) shadow trap lich king

Don’t stand in them. It’s not rocket science, folks.

A note about Real ID

Kurn / / general, patches, ramblings

Miss Medicina posted about 3.3.5 and Real ID stuff today.

I am someone who is very, very protective of her real life identity and would like to thank Miss Medicina for reminding me to let you all know that I do not plan on sharing my Real ID info with ANYONE I don’t actually know in real life. And even then, I’m not sure everyone I know will get my info. Not only do I like my privacy, but I don’t really like the idea of some people seeing me online on ALL of my toons at any given point.

There are three or so ways to get a hold of me if you really need to reach me: email, commenting here and twitter, in order of likelihood of my seeing stuff.

Having said THAT, be sure to check out the Battle Net page about Real ID. There’s going to be a lot of misinformation going on and it’s important that you educate yourself about what Real ID friending someone means and does not mean.

PS: Ruby Sanctum is patched into the game but will remain INACCESSIBLE, people. We’ve got at least another week’s wait on that since they want to make sure this launch goes relatively smoothly on US servers before they patch Real ID into the European servers. And THEN we get to play with the scary dragon.

Post of Miscellaneous Stuff

Kurn / / blogging, general, guild, paladins, raiding, ramblings

1) I’m behind on comments. I am bad. I will respond soon. :) Er, that might be Soon ™. Actually, probably tomorrow.

2) I have the makings of a post in my head about healers and tanks and obligations to guilds. More of an observatory post, looking back on the changing roles of healers and tanks within a guild over the years. I hope to post this sometime this week.

3) Getting to be around time for another Holy How-To post. I still find myself reluctant to do anything about healing meters and parses and stuff. Anything anyone is particularly curious about? Wondering about? Need to know about? Would LIKE to know about?

4) My new guild has done a few pulls on heroic Sindragosa 25 (before I showed up) and plans on playing with her tonight, so I’ve tossed in probably a dime’s worth of information in on the discussion. Tips and tricks for helping me NOT sound like a know-it-all tool would be welcome. ;) I seem to have three settings:

a) No comment. I just literally don’t say anything. I have trouble with this.

b) “If you have any questions, let me know!” which I say a lot in general (see #3 above!) but then that means not saying anything. With which I have trouble, as noted.

c) “UR DOIN IT WRONG”. (See basically every post I’ve ever written.)

Tips and tricks for helping me steer clear of “C” would be lovely. Not that I think they’re doing anything wrong or whatever, but I AM prone to opening my big mouth and would like to pre-emptively shut it, just in case.

5) Oh, yeah, PATCH DAY TOMORROW, in all likelihood, as per MMO-Champion. Dammit, I better get used to Sindragosa without AVR, pronto.

6) The guild got another holy pally app today who doesn’t totally suck on paper but lacks a shoulder enchant and a bracer enchant. He uses the 245 holy libram, not the Libram of Renewal. He’s glyphed for Seal of Light (yet gemmed straight intellect with one exception) and picked up 4/5 Toughness instead of 3/3 Imp Righteous Fury (right, armor’s going to be useful at all, there, buddy) while building down to Divine Guardian. He’s not quite off the mark enough to be “UR DOIN IT WRONG” but enough off the mark to concern me, so I wrote a quick review for my GM who was then basically like “<3” and asked him questions about his choices in his app thread. I can’t WAIT to see how he justifies ANYTHING!

7) Blog maintenance. At some point this week, I’m going to upgrade to v3.0 of WordPress. No IDEA how this will affect some of my plugins, if at all, so maybe Thursday is when I’ll tackle that. Pray for an easy upgrade.

And with that, back to working on my RL friend the resto druid’s website. Yes, folks, my life is really that thrilling.

Huh.

Kurn / / guild, raiding, ramblings

I don’t have a raid tonight.

I have been raiding 4-5 nights a week for 16 months. For the last 10 months or so, the nights were typically Sunday, Monday, Wednesday and Thursday, with a Tuesday on the schedule for at least two months in there.

It’s Sunday and I don’t have a raid.

It always takes time to adjust to a new raiding schedule and I REALLY like the idea that I don’t raid on Sundays in case I have a family dinner (like I do tonight) or in case I go up to the cottage (like I’ll be doing next week or the week after) but I have this weird feeling that I’m going to forget that I don’t have a raid on Sundays several times over the next few weeks.

What actually might take me a little bit longer to adjust to is eating dinner around 7pm like a normal person does, so that I’m eating pre-raid. 10 months of raids at 11pm means I’d have dinner around 8-9 or even at 10. Starting at 9pm means I should be completely done cooking/eating/cleaning by 8:30 at the very latest.

I think I’ve already adjusted to the four-hour length instead of a three-hour length, because the raids on Wednesday and Thursday really flew by. Probably because I LIKE these people. One of the reasons I was really attracted to the Hyjal guild was that they had four raids a week, Sundays, Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, from 8:30pm-11pm. Same raid days, smaller little nuggets of raidy goodness and MUCH earlier, which was a huge difference from my previous guild.

But, as a former raid leader, I know how much a raid can benefit from throwing themselves at a particular fight for a couple of hours, even if they don’t get it down. The practice (and the log data!) is invaluable. So, the four-hour duration (and therefore, the same amount of raiding as what I was doing, only compressed into three days, not four) appeals to me, given that I knew we’d be pushing progression. Not that the other guild wouldn’t be able to do so, but I KNOW that a lot of times, raids just plain aren’t as efficient as you want them to be and a 2.5 hour long raid is difficult to spend time throwing yourself at the encounter if you want to get anything else done.

Wow. I don’t raid tonight. Well, at least this means I’ll get to enjoy Father’s Day/Mom’s Birthday dinner without feeling rushed or being late. :)

Musings and Ramblings

Kurn / / apotheosis, blogging, guild, raiding, ramblings

I just spent about an hour working on my guide to getting the Key to the City, but I just couldn’t get the narration right. Most of the time, I just have a basic idea of what I want to say and say it, but I kept screwing up my narration. Perhaps 3am is not the best time to try to record myself describing a key run.

It’s now four in the morning and I find myself thinking about the nature of guilds. This is likely unsurprising, given my recent transition to my new server and guild, but it’s not just stemming from that.

Rohan, over at Blessing of Kings, always has neat stuff to say, but the other day, he posted about Group Content and Group Creation. Go read his post, then come back. I’ll wait.

Rohan talks about how there are two types of group content: transient and extended.

As I was reading the post, it dawned on me; I pretty much loathe tranient group content. I participate in it just about daily and sometimes more than once and I think the Random Dungeon Finder is amazing for a lot of reasons. But I hate the non-permanence of it.

It used to be that, back in the day, you would search high and low for a group to run a dungeon with you. Or, you’d get together with guildies and find another person or two and go tackle a dungeon together.

These people were always on your server; there was no cross-realm queue. These people were people you could add to your friends list and ask them if they wanted to tank/heal/DPS for you some other time. These people were potential recruits for your guild, too.

I remember doing a Molten Core attunement run once, back in the day. I was level 60 on my hunter and I was taking a tank and two DPS with me through to the part of BRD where you get the quest item. I’d done the run half a dozen times before and knew my way through BRD. All we needed was a healer.

After spamming Trade and LFG for a few minutes, a druid whispered me, saying he’d go.

The run was a success. We had one ugly moment with Ambassador Flamelash, but the druid healer gave us all some fire resist potions he had (!) and the second time was the charm. So impressed was this druid with the overall efficiency (and yes, leadership) of the run that he asked me if we were recruiting druids.

He was already guilded so I insisted he take his time to determine if he wanted to app to us, since I didn’t want to ninja him from another guild. A couple of days later, he applied and was accepted.

That he turned out to be someone who would chase greener pastures, leaving our guild not once, but TWICE, is more or less irrelevent. He was some pug who we picked up and was a valuable addition to the guild when he was with us.

That kind of experience is all but dead and gone now, with the Random Dungeon Finder. And I hate it. I hate that I don’t recognize people in my pugs on any server. I hate that I’m doing my daily content (for frost badges) with people I don’t know and may never see again (which isn’t a horrible thing in many cases, but still!). I don’t like that I’m doing weekly raid content (VOA/weeklies) without my guild. Of course, I COULD just do it with my guild, at least on my pally, but my hunter doesn’t have a real guild. Neither does my shaman, my druid, my mage or my priest. For those toons, it’s great to be able to pug the content.

I remember the days where you used to have to get someone to vouch for you before you’d be invited to any raid pugs. I couldn’t stand the warrior officer back in our old, old, pre-BC guild, but he knew damn near every serious raider on the server and forged those relationships so that he could get into pugs — and he’d sometimes have spots for others, which everyone jumped at.

This whole expansion has really been the rise of the pug raid group. Everyone can pug anything. This bothers me. Maybe I’m being a snob, maybe I’m being unreasonable and stubborn, but I really feel like raiding, the high-end raids, should be the domain of, you know, raiding guilds. I think that there was something special about belonging to a guild in the original game. I remember when we, as a guild, first set foot in Molten Core, four years ago. We basically just went in and farmed trash a bit. We got Arcanist Bindings, our first piece of T1 gear ever, which went to our resident Arcane mage, Jaymie.

It was this epic experience, though. Getting the Molten Giants down, the Lava Surgers, Firelords, Lava Annihilators, the Ancient Core Hounds (LOOT YOUR HOUNDS!!!)… There was a very real, noticeable progression with our group. We went from 20-some people farming trash to a group of about 30-35 people killing bosses. Lucifron’s first death was freaking amazing. Magmadar relied on us hunters to use Tranq shot and not miss. And, by golly, I MADE SURE my hunters didn’t miss! Downing him was a freaking miracle made possible by me and my trusty sidekick, Toga.

We were eventually able to kill through Golemagg. Killing him spawned Majordomo and we succeeded in spawning Domo a couple of times, even if we never did attempt him.

But knowing that we COULD attempt him was an AMAZING feeling! After attunement, scheduling issues, recruitment problems, balance issues, it was just SO EPIC, such an amazing feeling, to step into Molten Core and know we could down eight of the bosses. We were the little guild that could!

Where’s that epic feeling? It’s gone. Or at least, it hasn’t happened for me in this expansion. It happened in BC — seeing my guild progress from Kara through to killing Vashj and Illidan, now THAT was amazing.

Tier 7 content, barring Sarth and drakes or something like 6m Maly, was too easy to elicit any kind of pride. The proof is that my little raid group went in and cleared the Spider Wing and Plague Wing and got Razuvious down on our first night. Never mind that we never did kill Thaddius and such before the guild broke up; that’s wasn’t because Thaddius was hard. That was because we had no DPS showing up anymore, which is something else entirely.

The end of Apotheosis is where my extended content group and I parted ways. I’ve been looking for a new home, a new extended content group, since then, so that these downings actually mean something to me. I can count on one hand the encounters that really meant something to me since the end of Apotheosis:

1) Sartharion + 3 drakes: This was my big chance with my Bronzebeard guild to really show that I knew my stuff and wasn’t a noob. They’d already done Sarth3D a few times, but it was definitely not on farm. The first time I downed Sarth3D was pretty amazing.

2) Yogg-Saron: In the raid with me was my buddy Euphie and in a chat channel with us was Osephala. Two of my Apotheosis folks were with me, and Euphie and I were healing together for Yogg. Plus I did the healing assignments for Yogg and even made the useless priest be useful by getting him to take the portals. So there! Having Kal and Fad and Saku around was also basically awesome. I seem to surround myself with amazing healers. <3

3) Algalon: Killed this guy with my last guild, with my RL friend the resto druid. The “Astral Walker” title is the only title she and I share that we have earned together at the same time, so it is totally precious to me.

4) The Lich King: My healing strat based on my RL friend’s initial strat. It was super important for me to get him down because I wanted my RL friend to know the guild wasn’t stunted without her, that we could totally use having her back, but that she could feel free to focus on her RL stuff and not worry about the guild.

Plus, you know, being resurrected by Terenas Menethil is AWESOME.

I spent six months on Bronzebeard. Ten months with my last guild. And neither of them felt like extended content groups. Not the way my old Fated Heroes did. Not the way Apotheosis did.

I’ve been searching for a new home for over a year and I’m on to what is technically my fourth guild in this expansion.

Will this be the guild that becomes my new extended content group? Or will this just be another stepping stone for me before we try to bring back Apotheosis? Will this guild be the one that actually prevents me from becoming a GM again with Apotheosis 2.0? Or will this be just another bunch of scattered memories?

I’m not sure, yet. But I do know that there’s one more boss kill that needs to be added to the above list.

5) Valithria Dreamwalker’s rescue — my second “first time”: I’d been in the guild not even 36 hours and we rescued heroic Dreamwalker for the first time for them. THAT meant something to me. It meant more to me than doing it the first time I’d done it. It meant more to me than any other heroic boss downing. (Sindragosa and Putricide come close, admittedly.)

So maybe I’ve found a new extended content group that will last me at least until Cataclysm comes out, and perhaps beyond, depending on what my Apotheosis people want to do.

But I do know that it’s taken me way too long to find a group like these people, a group that even gives me a glimmer of hope of being something beyond a transient-feeling extended group. It’s not to say that I haven’t found some amazing people along the way (basically, all my healers from Bronzebeard save, uh, the other paladins, one of the shammies and one of the priests) but it’s been way too long since I’ve been a part of a group that I actually felt meant something. I’m trying to keep from getting my hopes up too much; SOMETHING has to be wrong with this group, right? Oh, wait, I know! What’s “wrong” with them is that they actually read this thing. ;)

But seriously, the idea that I haven’t felt like I’ve been in an extended group is an interesting one. Is this why I’ve not liked this expansion? Too much transient content and not enough extended? It’s all been transient since the end of Apotheosis, it feels like, even when I was guilded.

I think it’s this transience that makes me long for the days of BC raids. I hated the dungeons, thought BC was pretty lame on the whole, but my God, did I love our raids.

Okay, two hours after starting this post, I think I’m done rambling and pondering for the night, or perhaps more accurately, the morning.

How do you feel about your guild? This expansion? What is your most epic feeling from this game, and did it come from an experience you had with your guild?