Log on Thursday evening bearing bad news – Tir’s semester is winding to a close and he’s slammed with homework/studying.

The GM/raid leader was less than enthused, but understood that school is at least slightly more important than wiping all night.

I was on about 30 minutes prior to raid.

There were 4 of us logged and ready to go.

I ran out to the island and popped into the inn. I had my flasks, my feasts, my pots.

Quick note to the raid leader that I was going to alt hop to burn cooldowns (and repost auctions).

Hanging out in vent in case anything exciting happens.

Our resident DK was rambling about gear selection and dual-wield versus two-hander for AoE/cleave versus single-target fights.

The raid leader is mostly silent, save for the occasional outburst of frustration.

I take care of my auctions and even pop over to Selwyn for a couple minutes.

A quick flight out to a vendor and a mysterious orb was converted into a second kitty cat mount. Red, this time.

It’s now raid time on the dot, but the raid leader hasn’t said anything in vent about invites going out.

No one else has joined vent, it’s still just the 4 of us.

Back to Arioch.

Original guild message of the day flashes, something about reading the info tab for upcoming changes to the guild.

(Including the implementation of a loot probation period for new players to stop the revolving door of warlocks stealing my gear. I imagine it’s for more than just the warlocks, but I like to think this new rule is specifically to help me.)

Immediately, new message of the day:

Due to lack of player interest, raiding will be on hold until June 4th. Pugging is fine.

Well, fuck.

Looks like only one other person managed to log on in time for raid.

Total of 5.

I’m not really sure how I feel about it or what I’m going to do.

If I could cap VP for one more week I could buy my belt and that would be the last of my (reasonably attainable) BiS VP purchases.

I could continue to run LFR and be denied gear.

Maybe I could do some serious farming and earn the coin to get enough haunting spirits to make my BiS crafting pieces.

Pugging sounds terrible, but I might give it a shot.

If I’m even in the game.

I don’t see LoL tearing me away from WoW entirely, but there is a bit of a learning curve (over 100 champions to be familiar with) and a lot of reading to do. I feel like there’s a hill that I need to crest and then everything will fall together.

But without a specific raiding schedule, it’s like I don’t even know when to log on to WoW – LoL was filling the gaps in the schedule. Now there are no gaps.

Guess we’ll see what happens.

Tir’s been having a rough week so missed raid as he was passed out before the raid even started, meaning we were out our strongest healer.

Our normal (new) hunter was MIA for something in RL.

We did have a new warlock to replace the last two we burned through in rapid succession. We need a warlock vending machine. Hell, I would be happy with a Healthstone vending machine.

The warrior was busy, but his girlfriend was playing his character. (Much better than she normally does but she was even more talkative than normal. I don’t think she took a breath the whole night.)

We were short our normal heal and DPS spots on top of the absences.

Almost an hour after raid started we had a temporary hunter, a resto druid, and an ele shaman.

Off to Throne of Thunder!

And let the wiping begin!

Once again, we had to explain the concept of lightning orb placement to a new group of people.

(Tip – middle of the room is bad. On top of another orb’s fissure is bad. On the raid is bad. Just drop the fucking thing on the grate, FFS.)

We got through after a handful of wipes and moved to the trash leading to Horridon.

Goody. Goody. Gumdrops.

We have the QUEST.

The quest to kill the wraith chick.

The quest that is apparently downright terrifying because the druid and his buddy dropped almost immediately when the quest popped up on our screens.

Another 20 minutes of fruitless searching for replacements and we called the raid.

So I still don’t know what’s up with the quest.

The sad thing is last week we were a hair’s breadth away from killing Council.

OK, that might be a bit of an exaggeration, but we were getting really close. Interrupts were a lot better and Tir talked them in to 2-healing it so he could tear shit up as a ret pally.

Maybe tonight we’ll have 10 people that aren’t scared of a quest ghost.

As I’m sitting here, in queue — again — I just don’t see it.

(Yes, I know most of the losses were in China, but seriously? Couldn’t we have lost a couple hundred off my server? Just not the ones selling cool shit in the AH.)

…

What I do see is a very busy future for me.

I know, I know, I already don’t post here often enough.

But this time it’s going to be for a good reason!

I’m going back to college.

<insert dramatic theme here>

I’ve found a degree for exactly what I’m already doing, it’s available at the local community college, and I can take (hopefully) almost all the classes online.

Unfortunately, my long absence from the education scene meant I was pushed to the very tail end of registration.

Almost a month before my registration date I watched helplessly as my two summer classes moved from open, to wait list, to full.

Nervously, I waited for my fall classes to fill.

One did, but I was able to get in to 4 of my core classes for a total of 8 units.

Starting at the end of August and running until almost the end of December I will be a student again.

So if my posting falls off (like it’s possible to get much more infrequent) just know that it’s for a good cause!

(Or at least be comforted in the fact that I am most likely suffering. Whichever floats your boat.)

Once upon a time, I played the original StarCraft.

Like, I played it a LOT. On dial up connection. Entire days and weekends lost to scampering zerg decimating supply depots. Swearing at Goliaths for being completely incompetent at navigating a fucking 5 foot ramp. My life for Aiur.

I loved playing StarCraft.

I hated the player versus player aspect.

It didn’t start that way.

Finished with the campaign, I eagerly created my battlenet account and moved in to what I felt was the natural evolution of the game – I crushed the computer, now it’s time to play with the big kids.

Except they weren’t big kids. They were whiny, immature, sexually frustrated tweens with only the weakest grasp of the English language or common decency.

StarCraft killed my taste for PvP. Even in WoW, I’ve dabbled with it but it never really clicked as something I could enjoy for the long haul.

So as you can imagine, any game that focuses entirely on PvP has just slipped completely by my radar. Yep, I acknowledge that the game exists and other people might like it, but it wasn’t my cup of tea.

And then insanity hits.

Tir and I are sitting around, wanting to play a game together but not really wanting to log in to WoW. (Dailies… must do dailies… must resist… MUST VALOR CAP!!!! AAAGGGHHHHH!!)

He suggested that we log on to D3 and start at the beginning of Act 1 Inferno since my barb is getting ready to hit Act 2 but I’m probably a bit rusty. (I haven’t logged since MoP came out and I know they fucked around with my class. I was doing just fine, didn’t need buffs, rawr, I’m being an elitst jerk.)

I wasn’t really thrilled with the idea, I mean, I already have one massive time sink I didn’t need to reopen that can of dungeon crawling worms.

So he suggested League of Legends.

And I laughed at him.

Me? Seriously?

Playing a game that is entirely PvP?

Oh what the hell. I’ll let him load it, I’ll try it, fail spectacularly, get pissed off, and never log in again.

I think he’s learned that if I get dumped directly in to the deep end it’s a recipe for extreme anger so he wisely let me putter about in the tutorials.

The first one has you take Ashe, the ice archer chicky, across the map and learn some abilities. Super easy stuff.

The next tutorial walks you through starting a game, picking your character, and gives you an entire 5v5 game with the AI. You learn about secondary objectives and play through to nexus destruction.

I picked some guy named Garon I think – stereotypical brawny dude in tin can armor and a swishy cape.

It was terrible. The movement is so much more frustrating when there’s all these minions in the way and apparently some abilities can only be used on champions and some only on minions and I kept dying and the game kept yelling at me to stay behind my minions and finally we won but the game crashed at the end because apparently you can’t click a tool tip at the exact second the nexus is destroyed or the game fubars.

And breathe.

I was pissed.

So naturally, I logged right back in and tried it again, same character.

And I did just fine. Didn’t even die once and completed all the secondary objectives.

OK, so I can not make a complete embarrassment of myself in the first 20 seconds of a game.

Tir invites me to a group and we start a game.

But Garon isn’t there. The character the tutorial gave me has to be purchased.

Fuck.

Character selection in LoL is a timed event and there can be no duplicates of the same champion on the same team. I’m watching character options go gray as the rest of the team makes their selections.

Frantically, I choose Ashe. (Insert a really thinly connected Pokemon joke here.) At least I had played her once before for all of 2 levels.

Match starts.

Tir and I head down the bottom lane.

And I get the first kill. And another. And another.

“They’re going to start gunning for you.”

And I’m laughing so hard. They’re going to start coming for me. My first game, I hate PvP, and I’m currently the top of the hit list.

We win.

He loses the willpower roll and logs in to WoW to finish up his valor.

I sign up for another game, confident.

And my confidence is shattered again as I’m pounding on the Lock In button and it won’t accept my character selection. Someone had beaten me to Ashe.

I end up with another caster chick, Janna, or something. I manage to get the hang of her and we win again.

So I sign up for another match.

“So should I be worried that everyone on my team has taken Revive?” (Allows you to resurrect immediately instead of waiting for the spawn timer.)

“Well, new players take it a lot.”

“They must plan on dying a lot.”

And die a lot they did.

By the time it was pretty much over and the enemy had launched a major offensive on our nexus, my team had managed to claim 6 kills.

I was responsible for 5 of those kills.

We had managed to die over 20 times.

I was none of those deaths.

I went in expecting to be the world’s absolute worst LoL player, and here I was leading the team in kills and lack of deaths. (And 3 times the number of creep kills compared to the next on my team.)

I laughed again.

The defeat screen isn’t nearly as nice to look at as the victory screen, but I didn’t care.

I was too busy moving on to the store and looking to see what characters I can buy with my influence points…

Tir may have created a monster.

We zoned in on Tuesday night with a new hunter to replace the one we lost.

(If you follow me on Twitter, you might remember me talking about calling a raid early when one of our raiders reported he was puking blood but wanted to wait until the raid was over before going to the ER. Turns out he has a stomach ulcer. He was hoping to continue raiding but hasn’t logged since.)

We had a full complement of healers.

We had a PUG warlock to replace our warlock that suddenly went MIA the other week.

(He logs on via remote chat but won’t talk to anyone. Even if he was hacked or sold his account you would think he would log in to vent to give us a heads up on current events…)

So we entered ToT with a full raid, nearly all guilded.

Wiped once on our good pal, Jin, before destroying him.

Pulled Horridon and it was ugly.

Lost the warlock to parental aggro.

Things were looking grim.

Raid leader returns to town and finds us another warlock.

A couple more pulls, getting better and better each time.

Suddenly, we’re on the fourth door.

Where are all the adds?

OMG.

We killed all the adds.

We are all still alive.

War-god Jalak drops in.

OMG.

We are all still alive.

Jalak falls.

All hell starts breaking loose as Horridon rampages, killing the tank.

Battle rez is out and the other tank picks it up.

Some 30 seconds short of the enrage timer, we down him.

Tir got the Thunderforged healing trinket off his bonus roll. There was a staff I lost the roll on to the warlock.

The warlock joined the guild to permanently replace our MIA ‘lock. (Yay, now I get to lose gear rolls to a new warlock all over again.)

We poked at Council twice but it was past raid time. Back in on Thursday.

With Horridon being considered the cockblock of this raid, I’m hoping we can make good progress over the next couple weeks with our new team.

In a new guild.

Making progress with a nearly full roster.

Then the healers that were supposed to join disappeared.

And so did the next pair.

And the next.

So we slogged through a few weeks of Horridon with various PUG healers; all having their own strats, their own opinions, and apparently all having the worst internet connections in the world (judging by the number of “disconnects” we endured).

The funniest thing about all the PUGS we went through, was that the guild was actually functioning appropriately – we were in the right spots and the right time attacking the right targets, it was the PUGs that were all over the board in skill.

And then it happened.

Tir made a tough decision, but one which I am very proud of him for: there are more important things in life than progression raiding.

He told his 25-man guild that he didn’t have the time available to devote to raiding 4+ nights a week and he left.

There should be an account achievement for an absurd amount of faction transfers. That’s right, he came back home to the Horde. (I don’t care that he started as Alliance, he belongs over here under the red and black.)

Not only did he come back to the Horde, but he moved over to Area 52 and brought all his characters into the guild – including his paladin healer, which we desperately need.

So we had an established roster of 9 and a filler healer lined up. We went in to Jin’rok and were already chatting about our Horridon strat now that we had some competent (and consistent) heals.

Except we didn’t get there.

Our warlock didn’t show. He’s been MIA with brief appearances on the remote chat but zero communication with anyone.

So we brought in a warm body.

She wasn’t the problem.

Heals were not the problem.

Energy balls being dropped on fissures were a problem.

The more experienced players were making so many dumb mistakes. Even I tried to push it too far, hoping that a heal would reach me as I returned from delivering an electricity ball to the grate as the electricity storm started. I should have ice blocked.

But we seriously could not clear the first boss in ToT.

And it was the first night Tir was in there with us.

He left HEROIC progression to watch us fuck up on the first normal fight.

I was mortified.

But he stayed cool and calm.

We did go back later in the week and take care of Jin just fine, but we’re still short our warlock and I don’t think our last healer spot has been solidified.

With a PUG healer and a warm body, we did make it to the 4th gate, but it was just too much.

Hopefully tonight we can walk in and not wipe on trash (yes, we wiped before even making it to Jin the other week), kill Jin, and make some progress on Horridon. Maybe we’ll even have a full guild raid team…

But if the raid (including the tanks) aren’t taking much damage, what’s a healer to do? Another Valithria/Tsulong-type encounter?

Not quite. But close.

Imagine you zone in to the fight and find Thrall and Garrosh tearing it up. Like most “decorative” NPC battles, they would be locked in a stalemate until the party engages. So sit back, enjoy your Pandaren Banquet and watch the two heavies beat the shit out of each other. Garrosh, of course, has a gajabillion HP and damage reduction shield and probably all sorts of other buffs.

Around the room, you’ll find the faction leaders – restrained and wounded. Remember, Garrosh is supposed to really flip out with Sha Power so I don’t imagine this would be out of his reach. And while Jaina technically isn’t a faction leader, I can’t help but see her involved. (Any bets on if Jaina later goes Sha-touched and destroys something?)

For most of the fight, Thrall will keep Garrosh’s attention (Hey, there was a time when shaman could sort of tank, work with me here). But there will be times where Thrall falters and a tank will need to taunt Garrosh to give time for Thrall to recover. The tank will get hit like a truck and need to use cooldowns, probably external as well, especially at the beginning of the fight.

Since he starts with shields and crazy protections, the raid won’t be able to do much to Garrosh directly. But Garrosh is not alone! He has his protector force which he will summon periodically in waves. This gives the tanks something to do when Thrall has it under control and provides most of the danger for the raid.

To go with his gajabillion HP, Garrosh will also have a tight enrage timer before he blows up into full-blown Sha. The requirement will be much more than what a raid could possibly bring to the table. How to beat him?

Back to the captured faction leaders. In their current state, each leader can provide no assistance. It will be up to the DPS to break through the bonds (and any guards) and up to the healers to restore the leaders to full health so they may join the fray. A leader must be healed AND freed from his or her bonds before providing assistance.

Much like the Keepers in Ulduar, each leader brings a different skill set to the table. Some might provide a passive buff, like Valen buffs healing – making it easier to free subsequent leaders. Some might take direct action in the fight, Vol’Jin darts in and out with poisons. Others might give players a new ability, Varian gives the tanks an awesome devastating attack as an extra action button. Others remove Garrosh’s protections, a sundering blow from Baine cracks Garrosh’s protective shield for 30 seconds. Only through the use of these additional buffs and abilities will the raid hope to bring Garrosh down.

Once freed, the leaders won’t take much damage. But until they are freed, Garrosh will randomly target one to torment, bringing their HP even lower. If the healers cannot heal them fast enough or the DPS cannot free them in time, the leader will slip into unconsciousness and be unavailable for the remainder of the fight.

At the release of the encounter, raids will find it hard to free more than a couple of the leaders before Garrosh dispatches the rest. It will be a strategic choice to focus on specific leaders to boost weak points in the raid comp (hopefully before Garrosh does away with a favored choice to free). As time progresses, and raids gear up, it will be easier to free more leaders, making the fight go much faster.

All sorts of achievements available for this one. Release each leader (can be achieved over multiple runs). Only release Horde or Alliance leaders. Release all the leaders. Maybe someday, release none of the leaders?

I’m sure the Garrosh encounter is already well underway, but would anyone else join my raid to do this fight?

But first, another really stupid thing I’ve done in WoW!

Yesterday I talked about leveling up cooking on my DK (who got his 522 neck last night, FYI) for the express purpose of making mogu fish stews for the mage and getting cooking points at the same time but then I realized that the fish stew was a 600 recipe so I basically just wasted time.

*deep breath after that run on sentence*

Last night I realized I had been doing something STUPID for the past couple of weeks with my priest.

Selwyn is my JC. And he finally got exalted with the Order of the Cloud Serpent and purchased all the panther mount patterns.

Next up was to collect 40 gems of each type (20 for the first mount and another 20 of each to make the ultra mount).

I had the bright idea of using my gem transmute as I had lotus to make the expensive gems and then I could purchase the cheap ones later.

So I watched the prices for the gems and decided I would focus on the Vermillion Onyx.

That would be the orange one.

I made/prospected an entire stack of them.

Excited, I skimmed through the patterns to see which panther I would be making.

Wait a minute.

I’ve never seen an orange panther.

FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK.

Yeah, I wasted a bunch of lotus transmuting a gem I didn’t even need.

I’ve cut a handful of them and shipped them off to be sold. I haven’t really lost anything except the time it took me to get those lotus, but damn I felt dumb.

On to the raid:

Our first night in ToT.

We lost the guy that was continuously questioning his skill level and rearranged the roster.

Heals going tank, tank going DPS, GM recruited 2 new healers to test drive on Monday night in our first ToT trip.

Turns out both healers managed to get themselves saved and forgot.

And one of our best DPS lost power at his house; whole block went black due to the storm.

Do we sit in trade chat for 2 hours trying to scrape together functional healers for a fresh ToT on a Monday night?

No, that would be painful and an exercise in futility with a large repair bill attached.

So the raid got called.

So much for our first night in ToT.

Oh well, it gave me time to get the neck on my DK, make some glyphs, transmute some gems, and realize I was being teh dumb.

Not to loot, just to kill. Because I just get gold.

Anyway…

I am now officially 16/16 in T14 content and ready to step up in to T15 Throne of Thunder.

So I had a bright idea.

I should use the +300 food for the new content, really squeak out that extra bit of DPS.

Hmmm…. I’ve got a DK that’s got cooking up pretty close. I bet I could level his cooking really quick and make my little fish stews to get points!

Off to my bank alt’s bank (repetitive, no?) to gather up armfuls of groceries and ship them off to the DK.

Down to the Halfhill market where I dutifully leveled up the Way of the Pot to learn the prized fishy stew recipe.

And discovered that it’s a 600 recipe.

So yes, I can now make the stupid stew, but I didn’t get any points for it. Booooo!

And of course, I got the quest to finish leveling up all the other cooking ways so I spent way too much time digging through bags for scallions and redbelly mandarin and not any time doing useful things like making use of the fact that I valor capped and could be getting extra valor!

Oh well.

I’ve done the first two LFRs for ToT. I had to do the second one twice as the first time I got ported in for just the last boss. As much fun as it is dealing with a regurgitating bird, Megaera has some tasty loot that I wanted a shot at.

I was amazed that people still didn’t know about the SNAILS. I hadn’t set foot in the raid yet and I still knew about them. Was hilarious watching people die to them – repeatedly.

I think sometime this week I will reach the 6k valor needed to appease the little black dragon prince. Assuming I did math right… always a potential that I borked it up.

Spent some time on Mr Robot and have my T15 gear list plotted out. Need the price on haunting spirits to drop so I can craft my helm and boots. I didn’t even bother planning out T14 until the very end, so I can feel the difference in how I’m able to approach raiding now. (Love my peeps over at BV, but the weekend raiding was killing me. So much more time to spend with Tir. So much easier to VP cap when I raid during the week.)

Oh, and I suppose that means I need the cloth daily TO QUIT FUCKING GIVING ME PVP RECIPES AND GIVE ME THE LAST GODDAMN PVE RECIPE I NEED. I think I still have 10 more PvP recipes to go before I get the PvE DPS helm. Murphy says I won’t get it until the last one. But without the spirits I guess it doesn’t matter that much.

Shado-Pan Assault is a bitch to grind rep for. But thanks to the 1k/week valor gating, I don’t think I’ll be too far behind the curve. Assuming I can cap every week and assuming I move up reputation ranks appropriately, I can get my belt at revered the week of May 7th. So long…

I finally went to the Isle of Giants and poked around. Saw Oondasta. But didn’t think the other other 4 people in the zone and I could take him on. One guy tried. That went over about as well as you would expect, although I imagine his death was far less laggy than it would have been in a full raid scenario.

Pulled a baby dino and got my first bone drop. Then read how many bones it takes to do anything of interest (pet and mount). Stopped killing dinos and logged out. I’ll fuck with that project later. Maybe in a group so I don’t have to kite so damn much.

Stepping in to ToT tonight with the raid team. The first piece of gear I’m gunning for is on the third encounter. Hope we do well!

We’ll be testing out 2 new healers tonight. I hope they work out; was starting to feel the itch of “OMG don’t tell me I’m going to have to heal another expansion in order to see any new content.”

I’ll try to post the results of our trip in to ToT soon!

There are three reasons I don’t post:

1. Nothing is happening and/or nothing new is happening and I can only rehash the same rants so many times.
2. There’s lots of new stuff happening but it’s not appropriate to print at all or the timing isn’t quite right.
3. And sometimes there’s just so much happening I don’t have time to post.

Thankfully, my latest week-long hiatus was for the reason behind door number 3.

Last week I posted about moving to greener pastures so it’s only fair I give an update on how that transition is going.

In a word: GREAT.

O.M.G.

When we wipe, which we do, everyone runs back. Buffs go out without reminders. Feasts are laid in an orderly fashion. Instructions are confirmed and clarified.

I now am 2/6 in HoF and 1/4 in ToES.

The raid times are so much better, I have weekends free again.

Mostly.

I did log over to Selwyn and help my old guild in HoF for a night.

Ugh.

Punk kid raid leader explaining fights he obviously didn’t know the nuances of. Experienced raider (pug – over half the raid was pugs) would offer the correct explanation (in a very polite manner). Eventually the experienced raider got fed up and left after 2 hours of wiping on the first boss.

Per our raid leader, the problem was having “two people lead the raid.” It wasn’t the fact that people died to mechanics repeatedly. Or that as a healer with 17 ilevel below him I was keeping up with him (not sure if this means I still got “it” or if he’s just that bad).

Nope. It was that pesky warlock alt that wasn’t doing as much damage as everyone else but actually stayed out of the bad and explained the mechanics properly. Yup. All her fault.

I pulled a dick move after that, with proper warning to the GM that had invited me to that mess. I hadn’t eaten all day and really hadn’t planned on raiding, the invite came just before I was planning on looking for food.

Thanked them for their time and logged for the evening.

But back to my new pastures.

The leaders are pet/mount whores and more than willing to drag everyone along for the ride.

We’ve run BT and AQ40 (25 now? Who cares, it was an achievement and I got the red riding bug), and DS and FL (someone else just started their staff quest, I might actually get to finish mine! Over 600 cinders and counting!)

The GM personally escorted me to obtain the “troll” portal, which I used to kill a rogue that very night. <insert diabolical laughter here>

Sometimes we run heroics together, smooth as silk.

They group for rares.

One guy is a little self conscious and assumes any “we need to improve at [mechanic]” comment is directed at him, but otherwise everyone takes it all in stride.

I even ran old content with the mage I’m replacing in the main group (he had a job schedule change), no hard feelings.

The GM questioned me on a talent choice and liked my explanation so much that he’s considering testing it out for himself.

And the “angry raid leader?” Let’s just say he’s nothing I can’t handle.

Someone pinch me, this must be a dream.