How do you die so fast?

 

–quote from my arena partner.

And that pretty well sums up our first week of Arena for Season 6.

Let’s just say that when a rogue and a boomkin decide they want a mage dead fast they get it done.

Yes, I have resilience, almost 800. And armor made of tissue paper.

13 games, won 2. I went in with the expectation of winning 1 in 10 and being happy.

I’m in the same arcane mage/frost mage comp as last season, no Flavor of the Month DK/Pally comps for us; when we win there really can’t be any accusations of face rolling, we fight hard for our wins.

I had to lock down my action bars for the first time. In one match I managed to swap abilities on my bars not once, but twice! I don’t click much so to fuck up like that made me feel really stupid. Like, more stupid than normal.

There will be some tweaking with my keybinds, I found myself thinking, “Wow, if I had mapped this to that then I would have gotten that Frost Nova off…”

I completely forgot about the fact I made a mouse-over polymorph macro. Granted, it’s original intended use was for CC on party members when fighting KT on 25-man Naxx… but I shouldn’t have forgotten about it. Durrrrrrrr…

Dual-stealth teams fuck us HARD. No dinner, no movie, no flowers, no lube. And they never call the next day.

You can’t do that while stunned.
You can’t do that while stunned.
You can’t do that while stunned.

Rumor has it I’m supposed to be able to Ice Block while stunned. I have yet to pull this off.

What was nice is that even though we lost 85% of our matches, our rating only went up! We went from 0 to 94 in one night. That should net us a whopping 26 points!

Gloves can be purchased at 1300 rating. I didn’t even look at the point cost. This is gonna take a while.

The new system has a more “grindy” feel to it in that we will have to crawl our rating up since we didn’t have a lot of data from season 5 going in, but I’m OK with that. It beats the, “We can’t play more than 10 games a week because we might lose the little bit of an edge that we gained this week” mentality. It also beats feeling so defeated after a loss because we were starting in the wrong bracket and getting roflstomped by the “real” 1500s.

With dual spec I’m looking forward to signing up for Arena a couple times a week. That will really help when we keep getting matched against the same teams over and over again that kick our ass. No problem, go do something else and come back tomorrow.

Apologies to my partner for sucking ass have already been made. I’ll work on keybinds this week and maybe even rearrange my UI. I know I have a few things spread out too far and could do a lot to make things more “killer-friendly” on my screen.

I’ll edit this post later tonight to show our match ups. This is as good a place as any to keep score. I lied. Click on the arena tab above to see all the arena crap.

…

Random whispers while in the arena this week were a very polite request to purchase a port (which I would have totally taken him up on, had I not been in the middle of a match) and my disc priest buddy talking me into a Naxx raid.

Ended up going to the 25 Naxx raid when we were done with arena (damn I love dual spec) along with the druid healer from my guild and eventually our DK tank and my rogue hubby.

Pile into their vent, main spec loot rules, yadda yadda.

As usual, there was a conniption fit when I said something in vent. “OMG a girl!”

Yes, boobs. No, you still can’t see them. So why does it matter that there is a “girl” in vent? Do you think there is a chance that I’m just going to start moaning and carrying on like a phone sex operator in the middle of a pull? I could, but I don’t think you’re prepared to see what I’ll charge in gold for that. /wink

FYI – I prefer “chick” to “girl.” One is slang, the other is prepubescent and that’s just kind of creepy. Apparently most women feel the opposite way about “chick.” Whatevs. Cheep cheep.

I came in on the Four Horseman fight.

T7.5 chest token drops for mages, DKs, druids, and rogues. (Anyone else in on that? Seriously, it’s always half the raid).

Bunch of rolls… some druid is on top… voice in vent stating something to the effect that, whoops, they didn’t need to roll on that, they already have it.

OK, discussion in raid chat about giving it to the next highest roll (that’s me!), loot master passes the token to me.

Druid pipes up in raid chat, “Um, why didn’t that go to me? I won the roll.”

Turns out, he doesn’t even have a mic, it wasn’t his voice saying that he didn’t need it. For whatever reason he wasn’t piecing together what happened in chat and was a little late responding.

So then I have to open a ticket to get the loot passed to him. /cry

By the time I log in today, my precious T7.5 chest token will have already been magically removed from my bag and sent to him. He also won the T7.5 helm roll off KT. /sob

Had a running conversation with the druid the rest of the night, he seems like a nice guy and was very thankful that I was going to be cool about it and not ninja the piece. I even added him to my friends list. I figure he owes getting me into a raid sometime in the future.

For a while we had a pally they picked up in LFG. He swore he was 3k DPS. Turns out he dinged 80 just a couple days ago, is in almost all quest reward gear, prot spec, and barely pulling 800 DPS. Had no clue what vent was or how to roll for drops when master looter is in effect. Couldn’t figure out how to buff people outside his party (I did whisper him how to do that, I wanted my Blessing of Kings, dammit!). We didn’t boot him from the raid, just kind of kept him around for the lulz, he became our mascot. He eventually left, I didn’t even notice.

Quick armory after the raid… he’s got the zhevra mount from Recruit-A-Friend, no first aid, no fishing, no cooking, random blocks of instances completed in little clusters of 2-day spans. Hardly any Northrend Heroics touched. Has a ret dual spec, but the guy was asking how to change where his points were when I pointed out that most tanks seem to take the 5 points of Deflection in the ret tree. General consensus is power-leveler or eBay. I wish the poor kid the best of luck in figuring it all out. Sucker.

I did get the Legwraps of the Defeated Dragon off Sapph to replace my Leggings of Sapphiron off of, you guessed it, Sapph. Apparently I wear Dragon Brand jeans or something. That would be cool and I would possibly buy that in RL™. Quick, someone start designing!

I rolled on the pants on a whim, mostly out of spite for not getting to keep the chest, I didn’t think they were going to be that awesome for me. But then I went to my handy dandy little hit rating spreadsheet after the raid.

Yay! I get to stop swapping my off hand out for hit in raids, just have to swap out my trinket now, and I’ll be able to replace a +16 hit gem with something else, probably spell power and haste to keep the socket bonus in my shoulders.

During the Sapph fight, we kept hearing a woman yelling in Chinese in the background. Turns out it was the raid leader’s grandmother yelling at him to get off the computer and go to bed. That woman was an inspiration. I would have run out of things to say after the first 5 minutes. She eventually pulled the cable from the modem and he DCed in the middle of combat. We had a good laugh about it and he was back on a few minutes later after having relocated the modem and switching some wires around. It was worth the wipe.

And because it makes me feel good…here is the Recount for the curse removal on Sapph, and I still posted over 2K DPS.

On KT I remembered my mouse-over polymorph macro. Durrrr…. and it netted me SHADOW SHEEP! The pic isn’t the best, but I’ll keep trying.

 

Baaaa!

 

 

The raid took forever, but I didn’t care, we were having a good time. We wiped a few times here and there, but no one was being an ass and we all took it in stride. Beggars can’t be choosers late Monday night trying to get a raid in before the reset.