I haz a /squeeeeeeee

As referenced last week, there is a reason besides being low on healers that will keep my guild from letting me raid on my mage any time soon.

And it came with a /squeeeeeeeeeeee.

Those of you that happen to live within a 25-mile radius probably heard it happen, others found out through my status on Facebook or gmail.

For the rest, here is a pictorial clue:

Damage starts with RRRR

I had a plan.

It was a long, convoluted plan, but it would totally work for me.

And then the plan got crumpled up and tossed out the window.

When Cata dropped, I had to be gogogogogogogogo with my priest (as gogo as I could be working 60 hour weeks and sick as a dog) to be ready for raiding.

I’ll be honest, rushing through like that didn’t do a whole lot for me in terms of game appreciation. I enjoyed the new zones, but always in the back of my mind was, “I have to get through this and to max level so I can gear and raid.” But it was OK, because in the back of my mind was also, “hey, I’ve still got my mage I can level through here and take all the time I want.”

10 is more than 25

I mentioned the other day that my guild made the switch from 10-man to 25-man content.

A line that I wrote happened to catch my eye when I was proofing the post.

(Yes, I really do proof them from time to time. Not always well, but I try.)

This tells me that our ratio of people that should be there to people that should not be there is more tuned on 10 mans. It means that we’re filling raid spots in 25s with people that may want to be there, but don’t have the skill, or they have the skill but don’t want to be there.

And I started thinking about the numbers involved.

It seems like we have approximately 10-13 people that have the skill, the desire, and actually show up on time.

How to AFK in a Raid

I’ve been asked to produce more venom for someone’s amusement.

This is what you get.

I raid primarily 25s at the moment.

My raiding companions are mostly men, we have a handful of women, but the vast majority of any given raid is male.

There is a stereotype out there about women having small bladders and needing to stop car trips every 20 minutes to take a tinkle while men have bladders of steel.

I call bullshit.

Another Rant, Part 2

Read yesterday’s post if you want this to make sense. OK, it might not actually help but you should read it anyway, this is PART 2!

People were, and continue to be, the hardest mechanic of the game.

Things were hard and/or time consuming in vanilla/BC. Player base expanded. Pendulum swung (too far) to the other side. People complained that it got too easy. Pendulum returned. Now it’s too hard.

I wish I had started playing (and blogging) earlier. I wish I could look back at how it really was in BC and compare to how it is now, for me. But I can’t so everything is my own perception of what I’ve seen and read.

Returning to the nature of humans, we become accustomed to things, we are creatures of habit. Spending an evening in one heroic is hard to swallow when the week before we were blowing out a chain of 4-5 in an hour. We like slow rises or declines in our effort cycle, with pleasant, lazy plateaus. Expansions have a nasty tendency to reset the cycle and put us all back on the ground floor.

I remember reading posts from other blogs just before the release of Wrath. Many were disillusioned with continuing to raid, even if they hadn’t conquered the content – because their purples were going to be replaced with quest greens. “Wrath will be Outland all over again!”

And it was. And so was Cataclysm.

The cycle hasn’t changed.

The players have.

Another Rant, Part 1

Because it’s my blog and I can.

I’m expecting this to morph into yet another long-winded ramble that ends when I run out of words. It’s a long, winding trail, but it’s almost cohesive.

Has every one heard the term “Wrath baby?”

It refers to the generation of players (especially raiders) that came of age in the Wrath-era of WoW.

By all rights, I came to gaming age in the Wrath era. New Naxx was my first raid. I had worked on BC heroics, but more as a means to repuation gains for my own insane purposes than gear grinds for raiding Kara. I heard the stories of the raiders that came before me, walking uphill in the snow, barefoot, to wipe countless times in the presence of Illidan or Ragnaros.

However, there is a highly negative connotation to the term Wrath baby. It was in the Wrath era that concepts such as kiting, crowd control, or even more than a passing knowledge of how your class worked were set aside in favor of content being made available for all.