Weird heads

So I moonlight as Alliance – and I even have a gnome!

A gnome warlock… mostly this little toon wheels and deals in Ironforge… making a sweet buck off my druids inscription abilities and sourcing him herbs for his addiction.

One of the oddities of the Ironforge scene is this other little level two gnome that sits by the mail box.

He is one of our major competitors in the glyph market. The other day I heard the pally (who has also taken to the glyph market after watching me shower money around our lowbies) swearing away in the background about that “bloody Tradling and his helm” … and I was all *What the hell? I know The Pally likes his own gear in the manner of a teenaged glam girl… but I’ve never really seen him take a dislike to other peoples frippery, whats going on?*

So in I log… and I see the oddest sight… a level 2 gnome in a level 76 helm.

Check it out, I mean have you ever seen the like? I’m thinking it could be a common occurrence and this is just the first time I have run into it myself?

Gundrak is a funny place.

EDIT: Hmmm and I’ll be a little on the quiet side for a couple of weeks – have a big project due in /la sigh

Why Orcs with druid fetishes should not be allowed crayons in cafés

 

Oh don’t worry after we got the elf out of our system we started drawing Tauren druids… it kinda ended up as a crayon rumble in the middle.

Dirty Book of Tricks: Pricks on Flightmasters

AKA: Dealing with your average fat-arsed Tauren on the fat-arsed mammoth sitting smack on your Dalaran flightmaster

Step One: Go to WoW Wiki and look up Dalaran NPCs (or which ever town you happen to be having the trouble in)

Step Two: Locate the name of the flightmaster (in this case Aludane Whitecloud)

Step Three: hit Ctrl+V so all the little name plates appear

Step Four: chase the one for Aludane Whitecloud around the screen until you can click on it

Step Five: select flight path and get the hell out of dodge 

*mutter mutter giving taurens mammoths what the heck were they thinking mutter mutter*

If I ever drive my car over a cliff I too will yell “For the Horde”

The 20 dollar question of the day – how does wow impact on your average relationship?
Honestly I have no idea. This post is just an excuse to link to the comic you will find sampled down the bottom of all this text.

But wow certainly does have an impact, well more of an impact then the type of milk you keep in your fridge will in any case. I mean I’ve personally known couples who:

• met on wow
• met on wow and got then married
• male halves (of the relationship… half of the relationship … not some weird half gender or anything) who got their girlfriends into wow
• female halves who hooked their boyfriends on wow
• couples who fight over wow
• couples who backseat drive their partners playing style (its like the sign of an old-married-in-spirit-if-not-by-government-form wow couple)
• couples who break up because one half likes wow more than ‘couple-time’
• friends who broke up over an argument about nerdy wow things like a healer skinning in an instance (with the usual accusations of loot ninjas)

Hell I remember this time when three of the couples who played wow in my social group all lived in the same flat complex and you could wander down the footpath which ran along the front in the evenings and see each couple in their living rooms set up on two computers gaming… it was kinda freaky actually – like watching a gaming cult set up for the evening.

Particularly since I lived a flat or two down that row… and I had a computer in my living room set up for wow gaming… I started playing mornings before work just to be different :p

oh yeah that comic:

Yet Another Excuse to Play

What did I learn from this comic? Well … see post title. *grin*

It lives!

My computer that is – had a small technical issue which I can sum up as “VIRUS”. /sigh I had to do a clean wipe and lost all my video files, on the upside WoW runs twice as fast and I went out and brought myself a widescreen monitor to ease the pain.

Hmm and in RL news my somewhat-more-sophisticated-than-me sister has found herself a nice young man… apparently he is “a bit of a nerd”… because he is into playing “that wow game”.

So I sent her the following email:
————————————–
Woo a wow player – we will have to get you on then you can tell him that his class sucks since the last nerf and show him how to macro things. Is he an ‘uber’ nerd? Does he have a level 80? Is he a RAIDER? ^_^
————————————–

And I got the reply:
————————————–
Lol that conversation went totally over my head!!
————————————–

I dunno she seems to have the ‘lol’ down pat hmmm.

Which lead to me dishing out some detailed explainations of game terms (more information than she wanted no doubt) and also to a little web surfing which found the following mildly interesting websites:

• The World of Warcraft Slang Translator (couldn’t translate woot – saddness) ..err also has gold ads bleck
• WoW Wiki Game Terms
• World of Warcraft Slang

That last link is made classic by the list of exercises they give you at the end. For example we have:

1/An Orc walks up to you in the rolling plains of the Arathi Highlands, and says “you want buy gold 50 us dollar 1000 gold this server.” What do you call this player, and to whom should you report him? Use language as colorful as you want.

Classic.

So anyway I shall make it my mission to help my sister communicate with her new piece of nerd fluff, an experience I believe she shall find suitably horrifying… so I can probably dub it as a sisterly bonding exercise.

Rules for the lawless? How do you act on a PVP server?

Spark post… not ‘linkage’ for a change, see I’m learning the blog jargon – it’s only taken me most of a year bwahahahah… yep this post is going to be a spark post where the ideas caught light from a post by Slig over at For The Horde. (Side thought, as I can’t seem to exist without them, multiple bloggers seem to be a most cleaver idea for keeping a site live and healthy eh.)

Anyhows they all be messing with alliance characters on a PVP server over there, and the things they say are right in line with my own experiences of starting up on a PVP server – particularly things like the whole hunter adrenaline rush from keeping an eye on your humanoid-radar-pimped mini-map as you race though contested zones to points of safely… only to experience a quiet trip… then get walloped when you are least expecting it.

But Slig raises an interesting point, what are the etiquettes, the protocols, and the customs of behaviour on the PVP server? When does a person cross the line and kill the guy on the other side of the fence? What the hell are the rules?

I’d like to say “there are no rules” all there is to guide you are the patterns of behaviour. And even knowing the patterns it’s really not a clear cut scenario because you have to factor in the individual.

For example: Let’s say you are a little alliance gnome (hee hee yes lets use a gnome) catching a ride from booty bay to ratchet and suddenly standing next to a great hairy Tauren, who so out-levels you that all you can see where his numberplate should be is the little skull of doom. Now Mr. Level-Death Tauren could come over there and thunderstomp your alliance arse into the deck any time he wants to just to look at the pretty colours and /spit on your corpse… oh yeah, and he may just go there if you give him a reason, particularly if he has had a bad hair day.

Mind you I find Taurens as a race to be a weirdly fluffy bunch of guys and girls, probably because they are mostly druids where I come from – I swear they would all buff the alliance as well if they could. The ones you really gotta watch are those undead rogues, you just know they rolled forsaken because that class makes the smallest PVP target horde side before the BElfs rocked up.

Back to my super example (which has mostly been ‘borrowed’ from Slig’s post :p), so what are the factors in this PVP behavioural equation?

Numbers

Look around; how many of the enemy can you see? (Keep in mind, for the sake of fostering a healthly sense of paranoia, that you may be surrounded by unseen types  like rogues, druids and people on flying contraptions.)

You are both alone (”As far as you can tell” cackle.)

Honestly this is a biggy; a group of enemies is a bigger threat because they feel safer as a group and because some dick will inevitable decide to show off by popping off the nearby lowbie with something showy… that has fireworks attached. Being outnumbered is bad, being near an instance group of the opposing faction will result in skirmishes, being near a raid group of enemies… certain doom! (It’s all about mob mentality. Kinda like sharks really, the more of them there are, the more in the shit you can consider yourself; one wrong move and the feeding frenzy will start.)

So numbers, in this case they are nothing to write home about = One point for the gnome to live.

Location

Still looking? Well case the joint carefully for any possible exits or other sources of trouble. Do you see the bones of your people lying about the deck? Are alarms flashing up over the local defense channel about recent carnage? Do you see any kinda of NPC guard support, are they in a frenzy of movement? Where the hell are you anyway? what’s that area like as a trouble hotspot?

You are on a booty bay boat.

Ganking in the goblin cities is something people traditionally avoided because as a general rule they didn’t want a negative rep with the cartel or to have to deal with a bazillion incoming gobbling, netting and dazing goblin guards. Okay so some rare sorts would go out of their way to see this as a challenge to outsmart the guards, and these days there’s that whole rep achievement silliness messing up the equation. On top of that there is the fact that an end game pally could probably whale on hordes of goblin guards all day without taking a break, well… the guards are no longer really much of deterrence. But tradition would say that unless there has been a bit of a faction war in the area recently or theres a raid coming through you should be reasonably safe on the boat.

You on the booty bay boat eh. Not quite as safe as your own alliance ships, but it looks like a quiet day in booty bay – the Horde and Alliance are used to rubbing shoulders in this area. Hmmm let’s say = half a point for the gnome to live.

Competition for resources

Or rather it’s like dealing with muggers or ..hmmm pirates. Do you have anything he wants? Are you going to try and take something he wants, like a node or a herb or a mob?

You got nothing that tauren wants… cept maybe fear and a dead toon body.

This is another interesting one – an enemy player is more likely to gank you if it is obvious that you are running around acquiring mobs, rep items, or raw materials that he wants, “farmer toons” are even more likely to put you in the dirt because frankly killing you saves them time. On the other let’s say you are doing a daily like the argent tournament quest “At the Enemy’s Gates” where it really helps to have someone throw a few spears at the dude on the horse for you, anyway in cases like this an enemy player may help you out in the hopes that you will lend a hand when they engage the same mobs. Kinda a case of ‘I’ll scratch your back in the hopes that you’ll scratch mine’.

So that’s another point into the gnome lives column.

Class

What Class is the enemy you are standing next to? A Paladin? Run Away! A rogue? Sweat a bit… watch him… did he just stealth? Run Away! A Death Knight? Are you standing far enough away that they might be tempted to hit death grip? Maybe you should go stand in their toon bodies, or out range, or head back to the dock.

You are standing next to a doofy tauren warrior.

Class can play a big in the gank factor. Classes that are good at ganking have often been rolled for exactly that purpose on a PVP server. Keep your eye on patch changes, I think all of us on PVP servers can remember the reaction of the pally population to the changes they made to the retribution tree (no really the paladins all went mad.) The Pally reckons people still run away from him when he is out and about on his Paladin character because they think he might specced as a RET-Pally.

Our gnome is probably pretty safe. I can’t say I know of warriors having any particular reputation as a class full of gankage. That’s another point in the gnome gets to live column.

The movement factor

Is he moving? Are you moving?

You just made a friendly /wave emote.

Honestly the movement factor can go either way. If he’s moving he is not AFK and thus could hit the thunderstomp button, even by accident… yeah you might want to shuffle out of range in case he does that. If you’re moving then you are drawing attention to yourself – this could be good, I mean was that movement you taking off your shirt? Can he see your toon bra now O_O Yup I’m pretty sure those are more interesting moving then dead on the deck (of course Mr LvlDeath may be a lady’s toon and she may get pissed at you giving gnome girls an easy reputation – hmmm you can’t really win on the movement angle can you?) Or it could be bad … I mean – bouncy rogue? Some people just gotta stop it from bouching. Also moving targets can be more tantalizing then AFK targets.

Your chances of living have gone up – one point for the clever gnome who knows how to work that charisma.

Level

Oh God it’s a level death!

Yeah this one would probably work in your favour actually – if the other guy is so much higher a level than killing you probably wouldn’t offer much sport. I mean maybe if he was really really bored or maybe if they were trying to stir up some world PVP in that area – but really man if it’s a level death you are just going to be a blip on the radar.. yup it’ll be ‘blip’ and you’ll be looking down at your see-though hands wondering if it’s worth the effort to click the release button or if you should just go make a cheese sandwich.

Maybe if he subscribes to the “If its red its dead” philosophy you might have a problem… but then you would probably be dead already if that was the case. To be honest anyone within 5 levels of you (either way) is much more of a threat… cause they may decide they want to test their skills and the only reason they haven’t laid into you already is because they are girding their loins and trying to compare gear stats.

Thats another point to gnome longevity. Pretty dull affair eh?

By now you’ve probably arrived in Ratchet and the Tauren has wandered off to take a flight path… bet he was mounted and got there faster too – its rough being under 30 isn’t it?

Congratulations on surviving little fictional gnome!

Now lets roll over to that Tauren guy and shove a mike in his face before he lands in Un’Goro:
“Hey man, why didn’t you kill that gnome?”
“Eh… well normally I kill any Alliance I see. Except gnomes… my girlfriend plays a gnome. AndIguesstheyarekindacute. Look don’t tell my guild mates or I’ll break your face!”
“Yeah okay… that’s…pretty random”

Lastly let’s look at the “when is it okay for you to gank” question:

Whenever you want to really.

Whenever you feel like you can get away with it.

A lot of the factors above will probably influence your decision on when you might gank someone. The safest thing on a PVP server is to get the first shot, but I’m a bit of a cream puff about that.

Yeah I find I’m most likely to gank a lowbie if I see them camping or causing trouble and I always pitch in if I see a fight going down… even if I’m not sure who started.

Is that my head?

Yeah … that’s my head.
Nope… No… I have no idea.
Your guess is as good as mine.
And I spent a good 15 mins rotating the toon trying to work it out.
I feel some kinda impending graphic card related doom.

Linkage – Orphans fouling up the PVP?

Great post by Critical QQ about the orphans in the BGs and the impact it has had on the regular players… but it sounds funnier over there ^_^

[EDIT: Oh and Nimrock from 'For the Horde' has a post about it all from the other side of the coin. Hee heee and theres an almost RP flavoured post by Windpaw over at 'Shock and Paw' on the topic that I enjoyed reading. Namthe of 'The View From Down Here' also has a post about his experiences doing the school of hard knocks achievements.]

Firstly a (I admit it’s half arsed) solution to the frustration for Critical QQ - Emotes.
No really. Amuse yourself with the following emote macros, put a PVP swing on things.

/emote ’s orphan child wanders over to %t and knifes them in the back
/emote sends her orphan child out to frisk the corpses for booty
/emote patiently demonstrates the epic ‘teabag’ move to her Orcish Orphan
/emote just cast hunter’s mark on the alliance priest – time to send in the mana sucking blood elf oprhans!

Mind you it’s the last day today – better get in there and horde up those kiddies. I mean don’t underestimate how nasty an orphaned orc or blood elf child can be. For the Horde!

(NB: Keep in mind that excessive emotes can also drive other players up the wall – ahh I come from a RP server thus I’m excused for acts of insanity.)

Secondly we have my usual long drawn out rambling stream of conscience on the topics QQ’s post made me think about and yeah it’s not something I have ever thought a great deal about before, mainly because part of my battleground PVPer attitude is to take what I get in a group and work with it the best I can. I think it’s a pretty common attitude to pick up in the BGs for any BG-PVP addict; outside of the old school PVP twink guilds that is.

But when you do think about it a lot of players that are competent or awesome endgame raiders may actually flail around when thrust into a BG they have avoided playing for a long time. Mostly I just inspect their gear wistfully and then go find a druid or shaman buddy with PVP gear on to stand next to – so I’ve not paid that much attention to them myself.

I was always fascinated by old school endgame raiders who were so particular about their group makeups, you know the various synergies they organised for melee dps groups etc. Mmmm everyone in the guild raid with an assigned job of tank, heal, CC or DPS – everyone learning when they need to step up and slap something specific on a boss at an assigned point in the fight. Oh I know it’s not as organised as all that in reality, but the idealistic image I hold in my mind shines like some shiny shield of marching hordish doom. Cough… yeah I read too much Spartan/Roman influenced fiction *grin*.

In PVP there is a random job list and it is everyone’s business to get the tasks completed

Yup in PVP you have the assigned jobs – but no assigned class or group to complete the tasks. Especially if you pug the BGs and that’s far more common now that you get the cross server queue. While I miss getting to know people on my own server due to their own addiction to particular battlegrounds (it’s like a bleeding hole in my orc heart), I love the fact that I no longer have to crawl outa bed at 4-5am in the morning to catch a BG. Yes yes, I actually did this on a regular basis and it resulted in me spending a lot of my work day visualizing red name plates over people’s heads and jumping at shadows… no seriously I kept seeing gnome rogues… little dudes give me the heebie-jeebies because I think they are going to try and stunlock me from behind @_@.

So you have the jobs; take the tower, defend the tower till it burns, run the flag, kill the alliance general, break the gates, man the cannon, and so on. These jobs are a bit like a survival hunters shot rotation – based more on priorities with random unbalanced cooldowns.

And then you have your completely random lineup of players

I mean ever ended up in WSG with a group of players who have no healers? You get this weird feeling of doom because that also means no druids or shammys either and they make awesome flag runners. Oh how it hurts, but you work with it (or I’m finding these days you may just get a sudden absence of players as they all flee /afk) – and if you work with it you can sometimes… well actually do the thing. In one of these no-healers gulch matches I remember the flag was run by the most beefed up warrior I have ever met – surrounded by the rest of the group he just sort of walked through the alliance and when he went down another tauren warrior grabbed the flag and so on. We won that 3 to 2 – it was epic, but it did take a while. And of course if it takes too long you then get the BG whiners, you know them, they kinda go “blah blah let them win so we can just do another match” – usually people after the marks more than the honor and in my opinion it’s a bit of an indication they don’t BG because they like it but more for the gear or I suppose they could be burnt out, but man way to crap on everyone else’s good time.

The random lineup of players and the fact you may never have met these people before in your toon life means the jobs are also assigned randomly to:

• anyone who know what to do
• person closest to the glory point (flag tapping and the like)
• person with the initiative to actually do it
• person willing to sacrifice honor and glory for making sure the caps happen, the heals get thrown and the flag carrier gets clear by playing a supportive role

These aspects of BG PVP unite to create a comfortable chaos

So there you have it – a big sloppy group of random classes, specs, gear and abilities combined with another big sloppy family serving of tasks that need to get done to win the battleground – tasks that could fall off the priority list depending on the situation you are facing or the way the game is going.

There will be no raid leader to tell anyone what to do because if he pops up as a little general in raid chat half the team will throw the battleground to grind his face in the mud on raid chat and things will generate into a verbal mudslinging fest.

It’s this kind of random craziness that I really enjoy as a casual player – I mean I’m too casual to raid with the big raids because I can’t guarantee any set time that I will be online (I suppose I could crawl on after midnight consistently but who would want me at that hour… in that mental state?) I love the huge group action ^_^ I love finding out just how versatile my class can be when dealing with another class (and now disengage throws me all over the map it’s even more fun.) But the chaos, the QQ in the raid chat from the immature and undisciplined, the frustration of not achieving goals successfully 100% of the time because in PVP there is always a loser side – this is not everyone’s cup of tea.

Man one of the biggest changes I saw to the run of the mill BGs was the arena teams stepping into them for gear because suddenly you had small organised groups who knew how to work together thinking ahead of the game plan – like for example trotting up the horde farm in AB to tap the flag right at the start of the game so the hordies had no spawn point – you would know they were coming but you would have a hard time getting the ground support from a group that wasn’t aware of the tactic.

Possible disadvantages raiders suffer on the battleground

So the raider has no organised team, they get no organised leader. They will be lucky to get the buffs, tables and heals to which I’ma gunna assume they are accustomed to (three hot meals a day and a bed if you join a guild right?) The game plan will probably not be the same as it was the last time they played (the dynamics of a BG always change with the players – patches and class changes will make them change more.)

There is also the gear I guess… no resilience = a load of pain in PVP. And I guess a min-maxed raid character built to DPS the crap outa a boss may find themselves not lasting incredibly long against a PVP rouge or the area effects that now bring some true chaos to the playing field. (That’s the DKs mostly but area effects have gone through the roof since wrath was launched, I’m beginning to think you almost need a tenacity pet to save yourself on the mana for pet-heals and pet-rez’s.)

Mind you I ran around AV happily as a sub leveled shaman for months (I healed, I took advantage of keyboard turners, I had much fun), leading me to believe that the biggest disadvantage is coming into a BG not knowing the game map, the battleground rhythm and plain experience. Would be a bit like taking on a boss you had never fought before without having a raid leader or team members to talk you through it and realizing the dude you are standing near is a rude bastard who is gunna watch you die.

Some people hate PUGs as well as the BGs.

PVE to PVP Gear Divides

You know what I really (secret shame) miss?

The big divide between good PVP gear and good raid gear that existed for a while (can’t quite pinpoint it in the game timeline for you.)

But at one point there was PVP gear which, while crappy for PVE, was awesome to wear around while soloing on a PVP server. An endgame raider would try to gank you (like 1-2 shot you from behind) and you could shrug it off and then go to town on them. Yep I miss that feeling of “hey my armor is good enough to deal with your shit in the world map even though I don’t raid every friday to monday” – and really it didn’t feel that bad to get taken down by a bad-arsed gladiator types, because maybe they deserved to win a PVP match despite being ganking NE bastards… cough.

Of course now you can use your raid marks to buy PVP gear to get started in the arenas and its probably better than my scub gear so I gotta be all twitchy out questing again. Now don’t get the idea I grudge anyone any kinda gear – I’m more likely to admire your outfit then go green with envy… oh wait I’m already green  heh.

But it was nice while it lasted.

With friends like these @_@

The story of three little druid stooges… out in the woods

Okay so one druid was really a shaman, but hey I couldn’t think of a better title

(sad really)

Setting the Scene:

So it’s no secret that I am currently wasting my time playing druid alts, and along for the ride is of course one of my two main sidekicks (well I refuse to believe that I am the sidekick eh) The Pally – not The Warlock yet – she turns up later.

Our location is Raven Hill Cemetery in Duskwood.
Our Level is 22-23.
Our class is mutually druid, our specs mutually feral.
Our gear … ahh sub-par probably – you would never think we were dearly loved alts.
Our goal is to work together to beat on the ghouls and skeletons that out-level us, particularly as I tend to park my big butt into 2-3 mobs and go down under a screaming heap of aggro in this area.

The Tale Goes Like This:

Oh we were having a brilliant time, I was really getting into it – pulling mobs with feral faerie fire and taunting mobs in bear form so The Pally (don’t forget he is a druid in this scenario :p) could sit behind them and whoop arse using that ‘Shred’ ability which only works from behind (mind you it took some talking to convince him about the wonders of shred – I’m still working on selling the idea of integrating finishing moves into the druid cat damage rotation to him.) Or we would both go cat form and turn mobs into shredded kitty litter in seconds while competing for top of the aggro list. This exciting process was so much faster than the whole “root the mob, wear it down, stack a HOT then whomp it in bear form for a bit before tapping nature’s grasp to root it again – just so I could back off for another fast heal” scenario that I was using before we teamed up – let’s not mention the complications of attracting the attentions of more than one high leveled mob.

*Oh yes indeed* I think *friends are brilliant – they really make the grind fly by.*

Anyway in this area there is also a wandering elite called Mor’Ladim – when you are hanging around the house on top of the Raven Hill Cemetery where the mists and fogs obscure just about everything you can see him coming because of his glowing sword of DooooooM. (That’s right doom! – Doom because you get the quest to lop off his head well before you can easily solo him … which results in much death for the incautious… also he sneaks up on me when I’m herbing in that area, resulting in undignified fleeing… through a heavily populated graveyard or wolf infested woods… thus “doom”.)

There are just the two of us online – both of us filled with a sense of our own awesome awesomeness and we decide “Hey he’s only a level 30 elite, there are two of us, we can take him – it’s a sure thing.” We decide after a brief discussion that I will bear-tank and The Pally will druid-heal. Mainly because I had plugged a few points in the bear side of feral and I had a herbal heal via Life Blood which I could happily pop without throwing myself out of bear form.

So I tag ole Mor’Ladim as he comes tromping up the hill, with a feral faerie fire, a growl and a bear thump ability… and oh does Mor’Ladim looove me now. Anyway in horror I watch as The Pally dashes in behind the Mor’Ladim monster in cat form and starts walloping away behind him while my health takes a sudden down turn… guess I had been too convincing about the wonders of ’shred’.

*Oh well* I think *I’m sure when the healing needs to be done, he’ll be there for me*

HA!

It’s getting a bit desperate so I pop a herbal heal… and not really wanting to tell him how to do his job I start yelping “oh god Ima gunna die – err heal please?” I think he was working of getting outa cat form when I bit the dust. Maybe. Then he bites the dust too… hehe hehe fairs fair after all, he forgot about NElf shadowmeld being an instant aggro drop these days, my need to remind him must have slipped somewhere around-about me having to click on the release button. (Ahh harsh love – I’m sure it helps him grow… and grow.)

Happily it’s a short corpse run so we decide to give it another shot… and it goes pear shaped again… not sure what he is doing but those heals are taking an awful long time to get off. The yelping from my side of the room musta got louder (and more interesting) because The Warlock drops her study textbook or whatever unimportant non-wow thing she was messing with and goes to perve over the Pally’s shoulder to see what he’s doing.

The third time we go in for the kill I stack some HOTS on myself (I’m willing to give it another shot because my herbal heal is back up for the money) – and suddenly I wonder *why no HOTs from the Pally? I mean when The Guild Tree is healing in the instances he always drops a HOT… WTB a bloody HOT* – hmmm, so anyway I start doubting the healers competence and of course the yelping becomes “grr you no dps cat – you go stand like stick and heal me the big tank” from my end. It’s not enough and we eat dirt again… I’m beginning to think we were overambitious at this point. Actually this doom I think I actually hit shadowmeld and let The Pally go dooown – the evil things you do to friends eh.

I suggest Mr Pally try to tank it while I heal. The Warlock is intrigued by my pain… and the obvious doubt I am now displaying in The Pallys ability to heal anything – she finds this really funny.

And then I hear this conversation break out behind me where The Warlock is looming over the Pallys shoulder… and I hear things like:

Warlock: use blah… why isn’t blah on your toolbar
Pally: because I don’t use it normally
Warlock: well put it on your toolbar
Pally: Oh guess I never brought that, didn’t think I would need it
Warlock: why don’t you make a macro
Pally: I don’t do macros
Warlock: look with a macro you can heal her with one button press
Pally: Macros are hard
Warlock: Pssffhh – Macros only take seconds to type. Here I’ll write it for you. Just give me your computer
Pally:…..
Warlock: When was the last time you trained?

*Kill me… Oh wait I’m already DEAD*

OOoh my aching head.

Turns out The Pally subscribes to the min-max philosophy of wow (by that I dont mean the minimum effort=maximum output thing, rather I mean.. hmm well, kinda its like where you work to max out one aspect of your character ie dps at the expense of other things like say stamina and health… only generalise that idea and then add a cheap-skate angle.) Yup the man does not buy talents he doesn’t see as useful. He certainly doesn’t pop icons for spells he uses rarely onto his action bars just in case they will be useful on a rainy day – nope not he.

*mutter mutter … maybe my heal juice was so late in arrival because he was accessing the spell from his spell book… I bet it was a rank one heal! I always wondered why he rarely threw a heal my way in arenas! Mutter mutter… I keeelll him. He could have mentioned his doubts about the whole thing before my second death… did he even feel doubt? I bet he didn’t.. he’s such a ..such a PROT PALADIN!*

You know maybe it’s the hunter in me but I have this wiggly attitude towards death, despite the fact it has no real negative impact on me, I don’t like giving into it. I’ll pop traps, run, feign and spend maybe 15 minutes trying to avoid something that is probably unavoidable – yep when the yell goes out in an instance to make for the portal… I give it my damnest… and not really because I don’t like armour repair… just cause I’m stubborn.

Sigh.

Anyway the Warlock up and offers to drag her shammy over from the wetlands to help out.

“Sure thing” we say “that would be awesome.“

So she makes the Pally run the character over while she writes a few macros on his druid, organises the action bars… and remaps his keys because his setup is the setup of “a stupid-head”…quote unquote. Then she just won’t give the druid back. She is having too much fun and her druid is only level 12 on this server.

Turns out the Warlock is a much better healer (okay so she is actually a bit of a heal-control freak – totally heal happy and yells at me for healing myself because she has THE MACRO damn it) the Pally rocks over with the baby shaman toon, and he is a whole lot happier because before resilience shamans were totally his baby-love class.

And finally, finally… I get to go bear and eat Mor’Ladim’s bone marrow in revenge (or I would have if I were playing an undead character… instead I picked the herb he chased me away from earlier on – Ahh Alliance eh.)

And They Lived Happily Ever After.

(Well we did have a really good level 20 time. One of those game sessions where you think you have only been playing for half an hour and you look up and it is one oclock in the morning and you have work on the morrow – la blissful sigh.)

Release the Orphans

So the whole noblegarden thing is over, I ran around and collected eggs, I hunted for the uber rare female dwarf and found her (had a conversation with a troll lass where she told me that was kinda like a messenger pigeon looking for a dodo in her opinion.)

It seemed to be the general feeling that orc lasses are rare which really surprised me, I would have thought it was the Tauren girls myself.

Summing up my Nobel Garden Experiences, I can do this with a picture:

~dear god the eggs, the chocolate overload, I am so over the eggs. And yes this is pretty much the same picture as with the Alliance NElf… eggs is about all I really did, I DREAM of opening eggs. Yesterday I found myself scanning the Cafeteria at work for Dwarf Females.. I mean its a heavily populated gathering area… there was bound to be one… IF I had been playing wow – bah!~

And a story:
I am currently gaming with The Pally in the same room (on his laptop or my spare computer – its normal to own more than one computer for personal use these days right? I refuse to believe that that makes me a super nerd). Anyway because he is in the room I sometimes hear the strangest things that normally don’t get typed over guild chat or make it onto the mic… like the whole “Easter bunny pooped in the moonwell” thing (seriously WTF?)

Anyhows I am AFK net surfing – online in toon body but not soul and I hear from the other side of the room “Heh. Orc female spotted outside Orgrimmar”

ME: *ahh sure I bet orc females are in high demand with only a day left till the end of the festival… must be like panicked ants in the capitals..* “Wait – What – Where did you say?”
The Pally: “Outside Orgrimmar”
ME: “But I’m outside Orgrimmar”
The Pally: “Ha-ha you have about six takers already”

I tab back to my screen…

~lookit all those little green dots~

…and indeed I have a bunch of mounted horde rushing up behind me – actually that’s a bit overwhelming, I can see why lowbies wet themselves in Stanglethorn when a gank squad comes for them. My thoughts are this is really more of a valentine’s day event, makes you feel, err wanted, maybe even stalked.

Some Undead guy got his achievement and was actually nice enough to hang around and say thanks, those undead guys can be really sweet despite the punk hair. Funny cartoon to this effect (being a minority race in the times of achievement frenzy) over on the Warcraft site.

I did find it amusing that I could plant a flower in the dock of Desolace and it counted as seeding the desert.

And we have Children’s Week on at the moment or as one dude yelled in AV  it’s time to “Release the orphans!”. Really don’t think I’ll be getting that title – too much a supporting playing in the BGs. I mean I’m the lass shooting the incomings to death while you tap that flag… sigh.

Aren’t they fierce little hordets?