{"id":2772,"date":"2014-05-20T12:25:48","date_gmt":"2014-05-20T16:25:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kurn.apotheosis-now.com\/?p=2772"},"modified":"2014-05-20T12:25:48","modified_gmt":"2014-05-20T16:25:48","slug":"old-habits-die-hard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kurn.info\/blog\/old-habits-die-hard\/","title":{"rendered":"Old Habits Die Hard"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>With the news that <a href=\"http:\/\/us.battle.net\/wow\/en\/blog\/14167556\/548-patch-notes-5-19-2014\" target=\"_blank\">Patch 5.4.8<\/a> would bring with it the ability to add two more upgrades (4 ilvls each) to 5.4 gear, I laughed to myself. Why? Well, because there are several instances of Blizzard <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/devolore\/status\/403946825238847488\" target=\"_blank\">saying they won&#8217;t nerf Siege of Orgrimmar<\/a> (at least not in the blanket-nerf sense of the word). The most recent one was just a month ago, back in April.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" lang=\"en\"><p><a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/Nathasil_WoW\">@Nathasil_WoW<\/a> Correct, there&#8217;s no zonewide aura planned. We&#8217;re keeping an eye on overall progression rates in case targeted nerfs are needed<\/p>\n<p>\u2014 Watcher (@WatcherDev) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/WatcherDev\/statuses\/455848579551096833\">April 14, 2014<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script src=\"\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" async=\"\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script>And yet, they&#8217;re adding up to 8 more ilvls to every piece of SoO gear, every piece of Timeless Isle gear, every piece of SoO crafted gear&#8230; Granted, as Watcher states, it&#8217;s &#8220;nothing&#8221; compared to a zone-wide 30% aura:<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" lang=\"en\"><p>\n<a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/Consecra\">@Consecra<\/a> It&#8217;s about an 8% &#8220;nerf&#8221; that will take effect gradually over weeks. It&#8217;s nothing compared to 30% ICC\/DS.<\/p>\n<p>\u2014 Watcher (@WatcherDev) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/WatcherDev\/statuses\/466599750436155395\">May 14, 2014<\/a>\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script src=\"\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" async=\"\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>But Valor upgrades are still a nerf. I went through that in <a href=\"http:\/\/kurn.apotheosis-now.com\/?p=2598\" target=\"_blank\">this old post of mine from last September<\/a> (wow, was I ever off on the timing of the expansion&#8230;) and I still maintain my opinion that it&#8217;s a nerf. That said, I am also still a fan of the fact that the onus is <em>on the player<\/em> to make their raids easier.<\/p>\n<p>Anyhow, I laughed to myself at all of this and was, once again, pleased that I&#8217;m not raiding in any serious capacity at all.<\/p>\n<p>That said, I had <em>the intention<\/em> to cap Valor so I could walk into 5.4.8 with 1000 or 2000 VP and upgrade the crap out of what I&#8217;m wearing. I figured we still had a week or two.<\/p>\n<p>And then <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/Warcraft\/status\/468556904264765441\" target=\"_blank\">we were told on Monday<\/a> that, OH HEY, PATCH DAY TOMORROW.<\/p>\n<p>Wanna know how much Valor I had earned in the last, oh, two weeks?<\/p>\n<p>Five.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s right. Five Valor. I did one quest for 5 Valor or something. That&#8217;s it.<\/p>\n<p>So, forgetting for a while that <em>I am no longer a progression raider<\/em>, I got online and did my 200 VP Epoch Stone quest on Timeless Isle. In so doing, I also earned 50 VP from killing 20 elites on Timeless Isle.<\/p>\n<p>Total VP: 255.<\/p>\n<p>This was substantially less than 1000.<\/p>\n<p>So I did the unthinkable. I queued up for the first couple of wings of Siege of Orgrimmar LFR. Late on a Monday night.<\/p>\n<p>Wing 2 popped for me.<\/p>\n<p>By some miracle, we didn&#8217;t wipe on Galakras, despite there being ZERO tower group organization.<\/p>\n<p>Both tanks left shortly after that mess. And then we got some extremely talented players who were, and let&#8217;s be fair to them, total douchecanoes. One of them was the tank, the other was a DPS warrior. Both were very well-geared and knew their stuff, but oh my God. The language. The foul, foul, FOUL language, full of slurs and pejoratives!<\/p>\n<p>I was going to leave, but I didn&#8217;t. I&#8217;d already put in 30 minutes of waiting for the queue, plus 20 minutes on Galakras, plus another 10 of waiting for two new tanks to show up.<\/p>\n<p>Someone ninja-pulled on Iron Juggernaut and we wiped. Then we actually had a good pull and killed that. Killed Dark Shaman. Then wiped on Nazgrim because people still apparently don&#8217;t know how to kill adds&#8230; Finally got Nazgrim down, adding 90 VP to my pathetic collection, bringing me to 345 total. (Also, no Secrets through those bosses.)<\/p>\n<p>My other queue popped for the first wing and I was going to take it, except I was still annoyed and I was tired and&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>&#8230; and I&#8217;m not a raider.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s as though a lightbulb went off. <em>Who the eff cares if I don&#8217;t max out my VP?<\/em> I certainly didn&#8217;t care until faced with the fact that I could do more stuff with my VP today. Guess what? I haven&#8217;t even fully upgraded <em>most of the gear that I&#8217;m wearing<\/em>. (Part of this is because I want to get better gear before upgrading.) So, really, what the heck is the point in trying desperately to cap to get to 1000 VP before servers go down? There&#8217;s no one relying on me to &#8220;do my part&#8221;, there&#8217;s nothing driving me to do it, <em>except my own expectations<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>I declined the queue and thought about this.<\/p>\n<p>Even though I haven&#8217;t raided seriously (as in, not <em>LFR<\/em>) since the end of Dragon Soul, I am still wired to try to maximize my potential. It took a lot of effort in the first place to stop VP capping even when I didn&#8217;t want to any longer. For so long, it&#8217;s just been part of my WoW life to do unpleasant tasks &#8220;because I have to!&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>But I don&#8217;t &#8220;have to&#8221; any longer. (And true, strictly speaking, I <em>never<\/em> &#8220;had to&#8221;, but I felt I had a responsibility to my raid teams to do whatever I could.)<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s going to take some time to adjust to this whole &#8220;I can do whatever I want&#8221; thing. Breaking such a long-standing old habit is definitely <em>not<\/em> as easy as one might think. Even now, I&#8217;m filled with residual &#8220;dammit, why didn&#8217;t I cap VP for three weeks prior to today?!&#8221; thoughts and I even have a bit of guilt resulting from it.<\/p>\n<p>You&#8217;d think that not having played for ~17 months would have cured that right quick, but no. It&#8217;s as though my &#8220;decompression&#8221; from being a raider was just on pause until I got back into the game and NOW I&#8217;m dealing with what it&#8217;s like to not be a raider.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s still so very, very strange.<\/p>\n<p>Thought I&#8217;d share. :)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>With the news that Patch 5.4.8 would bring with it the ability to add two more upgrades (4 ilvls each) to 5.4 gear, I laughed to myself. Why? Well, because there are several instances of Blizzard saying they won&#8217;t nerf Siege of Orgrimmar (at least not in the blanket-nerf sense of the word). The most [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51,14,112,98,78,19,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2772","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-facepalm","category-gear","category-lfr","category-mists-of-pandaria","category-patches","category-raiding","category-ramblings"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kurn.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2772","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kurn.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kurn.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kurn.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kurn.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2772"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/kurn.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2772\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kurn.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2772"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kurn.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2772"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kurn.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2772"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}