bloggy stuff for not-raiding times

Our WoW raiding break extends till next week. And good thing, too, because I broke my gaming computer trying to upgrade!

Ahem. Don't let Enlynn near the hardware. I'm hoping that my wonderful guildies can help me troubleshoot.

In case you haven't noticed my lack of enthusiasm for raiding, my lack of posting, my... er. Lack in general. I'm not quitting WoW. I would like to see Deathwing die and we've got a couple more fights to learn yet. I will see my guild through to that as long as we can make it happen.

But I have to be honest with you. I don't know what things look like for me past that. And I don't want to go quietly and just let this blog fall to dust. I love this community. It's hard to even think about saying goodbye. I remember some of the wonderful WoW bloggers who have already closed their doors. I almost cried when Larisa shut down PPI. My blogroll and RSS feed are full of WoW bloggers who haven't updated since February or March.

I've gotten so many readers who leave awesome comments. Judging by my stats, I've had quite a few lurkers who've never said a word (please don't think I'm asking you to de-lurk. I feel guilty when bloggers ask for it, fiddle around with a comment before I delete it and don't de-lurk. So you're in good company). I have enjoyed this blog. It taught me a lot about myself, about gaming community, about the game. I hope you found it useful. I hope you found it funny once in a while.

And if for some reason you can't get enough of me (and you are interested in a Star Wars blog), you can find me writing at pealsheals.wordpress.com. Still talking about healing. :)

In the meantime, I'm not disappearing just yet. Here's hoping for some good raiding in the new year!

a holiday lull

I have been avoiding this post for a while now.

For one, it's been a quiet December. With the release of the DW tier, I was at first disappointed with how "easy" the first few bosses were but after considering Blessing of King's take on normal tuning, I dare say Rohan is right. We've gotten to 5 bosses down (6 on 10). It was really nice not to be stuck on the first boss for weeks. Having only one fight to work on isn't enough to sustain us and it just plain sucks.

But the last couple of weeks, we've had trouble filling raids. Last week was expected, with holiday parties and obligations. My planned "10 batches of cookies in 30 hours" took more like 80, so our calling the raids was a relief. I ran right back to the kitchen and haven't played much at all.

I think the question in a lot of people's minds is "Will Star Wars kill WoW?" and on one hand, WoW is not dying. I don't think it is, I don't think WoW is going away.

On the other... I do think SWTOR will kill some guilds. 25s have been in a precarious position all year. You know it's bad when the premiere hardmode guilds on your server are recruiting in trade and cancelling raids. Seems to me like 10-mans are the way to go, and in MoP 25s will finally die the big death. Players who prefer the larger format will have to choose to stay or try a new game. Like Star Wars.

But... Not because SWTOR is super-great or shiny or everything that WoW isn't. None of that. Remember when I qq'd that a Crab Stole My Kill? I haven't gotten my joy back in playing WoW since then. I've still raided, but something is missing. I wonder how many others like me are feeling the same way.

The only thing I've gotten excited about is transmog. For some reason I love collecting late Classic and BC green-quality plate. Can I just say one thing? I make plate look good.

good things in threes

1. HM Lord Rhyolith is DEAD. DEAD!

2. I got Exalted with our Rhyo kill.

3. A guildie got his legendary tonight.

(I got my helm the other night so I actually look like I'm raiding in Firelands now.)

Safe to say that's a pretty great night in raiding.

that time of the year/expac/tier again...

It took several weeks of AH-camping... my mog set is mostly complete.

I need a better weapon, but otherwise I'm pretty happy.

In other news... Meh. I'm glad we got an apology but cynical-enlynn thinks it sounds forced.

My guild is stuck on Rhyolith 25H. A bad kind of stuck, in which I feel like we have hit a wall and haven't figured out how to knock it down. Well, I have a few ideas of who to knock down but that isn't very nice of me. :)

In some ways I wish 4.3 would hurry itself up. And yet I don't want it to because I am really not ready to "rush" through that tier of content just to have 5.0 thrust on us before we're ready.

(I may or may not be a little bitter about the mid-tier nerfs for Firelands).

But there are good things. For instance, our healing team.

They aren't good. They're great. We're doing lean, mean teams for farm content. 4-healing Baleroc is fun as all-get out (we have 3 shadow priests, too, which is pretty neat) and our team is flexible enough to make that happen. I love that. We've gotten into a solid enough groove in the tier that we don't talk too much about who's going to do what, we just do it.

We've been recruiting healers for a while. The last two or three apps have been paladins who can only heal. I hate to be a paladin-snob (okay, okay, I love being a paladin-snob but I realize how much of a pain it is for all you non-paladins), but to be gentle, it's hard to impress me. And we have enough healer-only healers that any newcomers to the group have got to have a DPS set.

I just find it kinda funny. This time last year we couldn't find a second paladin healer to save our lives. Now we have two regular ones plus they make up the majority of the applications? I can't win.

It is that time of the tier, again.

It is that time of the year, again, too. NaNoWriMo. My master plan to get Luxinterior to do some guest posts may or may not get you some humor during the month of November. Just don't life grip him, it never ends well.

reluctant transmog

So... Blizzard has this brilliant, brilliant strategy. Since they know they aren't offering us enough new content this expansion, they tried to offer us a huge time-sink comparable to raiding that would set both raiders and non-raiders a-tizzy with excitement.

This time-sink recycles old content and encourages nostalgia runs.
It potentially demands re-running ad nauseum old content and nostalgia runs.
It puts enough restrictions that players will have to spend more time deciding what they want, then more time going and getting what they decided on.

Oh, transmog, you genius you.

I wasn't going to participate. How dare I accept transmog instead of a whole tier of raiding? How dare Blizzard think they can promise me more bosses for Cataclysm and only deliver us 7 for T12, then nerf the hell out of that and put this new shiny not-raiding thing before me? Huh? Huh!

And yet... I've been looking around for stuff I might like to be for my transmog set. Pally tier gear doesn't do it for me (though if I could replicate my ICC set I would, but I wore cloth and mail then). So I've been shopping on the Auction House. I found a set of greens from BC I think I really like. No pictures yet, I need a belt.

It all started when we were doing Ulduar (because we only had 22 people show up for a raid, and we had to do something). Lots of purple drops. This mace dropped off of somebody. I thought, hey, that's kinda neat. The loot officer said, take it, what else are we gonna do with it.

Granted, I love having my spellpower axe, but I'm also aware that next tier I'll probably be stuck with a mace. Again.

Since then I've been camping the AH looking for neat gear. And we're not able to use this feature yet! How ridiculous is this?

Team Heal

So... apparently I was linked from joystiq last week which made for a whole lot of comments (which I appreciate! Very good conversations there) and almost 800 pageviews (which is by far a new record for my humble little blog). It did, however, paralyze me with the "what to post next" fear.

I love my healing team. And since I hadn't praised them lately I wrote up a quick "I don't deserve you but thanks for kicking ass anyways" post.

The occassion? Ragnaros. Though Laghelm was a letdown, Ragnaros is still pretty crazy even in his nerfed shame. We spent several nights on him, got him down yesterday. We're 7/7 and looking towards hardmodes!

There! Are! Four! Lights!

One of our tanks made this banner for me and our co-GM.


Saddith for President!

a crab stole my kill

Monday Night is progression night. Actually, so is Thursday. But this is a story about Monday night progression, two nights ago specifically, in which a 25 guild has put in many, many attempts on Majordomo Staghelm.

Or, as Lux affectionately named him, Majordomo Laghelm.

Now, Laghelm gave us fits. I'll admit, I was a part of the problem as I tried and failed getting healer cooldowns in some sort of order. I'm not as good at calling out things in voice chat as I'd like to think I am. I wavered between too many too early and trying to save too many too long. I was inconsistent and jumbled up timing. But anyways. We finally got the hang of it last week.

Our best attempt on Monday night was 140k, less than 1%. It was so to-the-wire that someone missed their seed and it was over just like that. A shaman even popped in the vain hopes that dots would kill the boss in the 1-1/2 seconds he borrowed to extended the encounter. But no, it was not to be, and that was our last attempt for the night.

So... well, likely you see where this is going. Enter some nerfs. We kill the first four bosses with absolutely no problems. Alysrazor is so much of a joke now that during the second tornado phase I tried to run into a tornado and I still didn't take any damage.

We one-shot Majordomo. And I couldn't even bring myself to congratulate the healers on a job well-done. Normally I bug the RL to give us EP for good first or early kills but I could only joke about it.

I didn't roll on the healing trinket, either. I wasn't sure that I wanted it (the mana regen ones win out in theory-crafting though I feel so far removed from that this tier I don't know), and on top of that, I couldn't bring myself to be excited about loot. Why bother? We totally didn't earn that.

I've been deflated.

And the worst part is, we'll be going after Ragnaros tonight but I can't get excited. At all. Because if it's anything like the nerfed Domo and Alys, then I'll never even know how that fight is supposed to feel.

So yeah. We'll be onto heroic modes soon enough, which is nice because that's what we were before Cataclysm came and made 25s hard to fill. But then, HMs are getting nerfed too. I can't say I'll feel like I've earned anything from here on out.

I wonder about the future of raiding. I understand that this mid-tier nerfing is likely a test run of Looking For Raid, but if we can look forward to more mid-tier nerfs, then there's a lot less motivation. If you can't stay cutting edge, there's no sense in trying in the beginning. Why just make some half-assed attempts in the first few months, waiting out until you can get your loot on a platter? How am I going to analyze our new healers if there's no trying fights, and does it really matter since we can probably 4-heal anything now?

Oh, cynical Enlynn is cynical. Pardon me. I assure you, the angst in the first half of the post was earned. This isn't the end of me raiding or playing WoW...

But for the first time ever, I just don't care. That, I think, is a very bad sign. I was disappointed by Cata only being three tiers and this tier only having 7 bosses. I'm not ready for Deathwing to be in the next patch. I'm not ready to think about leveling up and learning yet another paradigm.

And I'm certainly not ready for loot on a platter when our progression was actually going just fine, thank you very much.