She Deep Breaths More

….And blows the layer of dust off this place.

I don’t anticipate having much more time to post regularly here than I have, but I can at least still use the place for WoW posts when that’s what I feel like writing about.

To recap from my absence;

Major roster changes; about half the core raiders we had when I was regularly updating are gone due to various RL reasons, and my partner tank Ossifer Bear is now Ossifer Tree and looks to be so for good. We did clear out ICC and kill the Lich King before Cata hit, and it was probably the most satisfying and epic moment of the entire game for me and I’m still a bit sorry for not writing about it when it happened. The short version is that after weeks of wiping and a particularly dismal night of failure, we walked in the next raiding night and one-shot the fight in a performance so flawless it might as well have been professionally choreographed. Strange, but that’s the way a lot of fights worked for us- we’d fail in every possible imaginable way and then things would suddenly gel for everybody.

My flirtations with other tanking classes are pretty much over. I still enjoy playing my warrior, DK, and now baby bear alts, but I love the way protection paladins play now and can’t imagine ever changing my main. (It doesn’t hurt at all that Juujube the blood elf became Jujutan the tauren the day of launch and I no longer am forced to be the world’s most anorexic tank.)

I Over-Complicate My Life

Much to my surprise, now that our team rating has dropped us into something like our peers in Arenaland who also probably ponied up their tournament registration for schnitzengiggels and a pet, I find that I’m actually having a lot of fun with it. Now that I’m not guaranteed to die instantly in an explosion of fail, the teamwork and tactics are actually pretty enjoyable; it has much of what I enjoy about raiding, except it’s different every time, only requires three people instead of ten at the minimum, and only takes about three to four minutes per game instead of all night. (Although on the con side, when I wipe to a raid boss the raid boss has never, ever tried to teabag me afterward.) I think I might want to actually keep doing this after the tournament is over.

Problem: I hate PvP as a paladin. Healing gives me ulcers in a raid let alone in an arena setting, and ret, while having good burst damage, has the mobility of a ruptured cow. The hand abilities are nice, but most of ret arena is running around being kited while casting hand of freedom and protection and trying to die last. I enjoy the arms warrior I’m playing on the tournament server way, way more. In terms of crowd control and interrupts, warriors are light years ahead of paladins.

My warrior on my home server is only level 53 and not likely to get that much further while the tournament’s still going, since that’s eating up my usual non-raiding or preparing for raiding time. I really enjoy her both as a PvE class and as a character; that she’s going to be leveled to max and become either my new main come Cataclysm or my most favored alt is basically a given. I already know that I like arena as an arms warrior and it’s what I’ve been practicing so far. On the other hand, it’s not really likely that she’s going to get to 80 all that quickly; my time for playing alts is limited, especially with Stingray wrapping up Loremaster and not having any solo projects of his own anymore. If I want to keep playing arena with the team we have going now, I’d need to either create more time to level her faster or oblige us to take a break or run 2s.

My hunter, on the other hand, is 80 and doing absolutely nothing but gathering virtual dust. I do enjoy PvP as a hunter substantially more than I do as a paladin, and in any case it’d bring some range to our team, which currently relies on heavy crowd control to deal with being healer/melee/melee. I do still like the character even if the class has lost its charms for me in PvE, and I wouldn’t mind seeing him doing something useful again. On the other hand, that’d be a lot of time doing content I don’t much enjoy as a hunter anymore (dungeons for badges for starter gear, grinding up a PvP pet), and would be even more time not playing the character I’d rather play.

My life is filled with hardship, having to choose between several different activities in game that I find fun rather than going through end-of-expansion burnout…

Gchat Quote of the Day

From one of our rogues, who is also the mother of a seven-month-old:

“My daughter has officially the learned the ‘drop a toy, then knock mommy out of stealth when she reaches for it’ game.”

Guild consensus: roll a hunter for the kid.

I’m Doing Science And I’m Still Alive

Okay, not so much with the science, though I’ve been plenty buried in studying raid strats and theorycrafting my badge and gold spending as we spend more time in Progression Town and my frost badge choices get less obvious. Either way, between real life hecticness and a writer’s dry spell during which I prioritized my regular blog when it came to unwillingly choking up content, this blog hasn’t gotten much attention lately.

Schedule aggro continues to be far more of a boss than the actual bosses are. We’re doing wonderfully when we’re able to get in there with everyone; we one-shot Festergut on our first serious attempt on him, and after doing a few under-researched runs on Rotface that night, came back to drop him like a sack of very ugly potatoes on the very first try of our return with an extended raid ID. We had a couple of experimental wipes on Putricide, determined Crimson Halls would be a softer target (think we need more DPS to kill the adds faster, among various strategic and positioning issues), and then had some more experimental wipes on Crimson Halls trash and Blood Council. I posted a bunch of guides to Crimson Halls stuff from various perspectives, so I’m pretty optimistic about taking out the Council and perhaps Lana’thel tomorrow. On that note, if anyone has a solid strat on handling the trash in there, I haven’t found it yet. Obviously we cleared it, but not cleanly and it’s not fun to die on trash.

No-shows are rarer, but people also aren’t signing up as much if they’re not sure that they wouldn’t rather spend the night doing something else rather than showing up hoping for a call from the bench. We are trying to rotate people in as best we can, but people are hedging their bets on getting rotated and not signing up.

I’ve been bowing to the benefits of honor (I really want a spikey wolf to ride instead of a prissy horse with curtains or an insane chicken), and doing the random battlegrounds. I have the world’s *cheesiest* ret pally PvP rotation which is literally bound to a single button, but works horrifyingly well since it means all my emergency buttons are in easy, fast reach. I *am* the paladin everyone hates; I’m sure I’d be slaughtered in arena but in BGs I’m just That Bastard. I’ve also determined that while Mal’Ganis may have some very awesome people, it is also almost invariably the tag attached to the guy (or guys) initiating the following conversation in AV:

MGite: “ZERG!! ZERG!! ZERG!! ZERG!! ZERG!! ZERG!! ZERG!! ZERG!! ZERG!!”
Other servers: “We don’t seem to have a tank.”
MGite: “I’M TANK ZERG! ZERG! ZERG! I’M TANK! ZERG!! ZERG!! ZERG!! ZERG!!”
OSites: “How does zerg work?”
MGite: “ZERG!! ZERG!! ZERG!! ZERG!! ZERG!! ZERG!! ZERG!! ZERG!! ZERG!! ZERG!!”
OSites: “We zerg, then we wipe horribly, usually.”
MGite: “ZERG!! ZERG!! ZERG!! ZERG!! ZERG!! ZERG!! ZERG!! ZERG!! ZERG!! ZERG!!”
*repeat theme of “zerg” with occasional voices of reason until boss*
*I’M TANK ZERG pulls boss*
*I’M TANK ZERG is chain cycloned by defending boomkin with nary a hint of PvP trinket or his own hand of freedom*
MGite: “OMFG NO ONE HEALED ME FAIL”
MGite: “ZERG!! ZERG!! ZERG!! ZERG!! ZERG!! ZERG!! ZERG!! ZERG!! ZERG!! ZERG!!”

I wish I were exaggerating. While I’ve run through several variants of this in AV, all of this is verbatim from today. If you’re interested, we ZERG’d uselessly until our horrible defeat while the Mal’Ganite’s (three of them) occasionally mixed up ZERG with verbal abuse about how fail the rest of us were and what useless asses anyone NOT DOING WHAT THE REST OF THE RAID IS DOING are.

I apologize to anyone from Mal’Ganis reading this, because it means that you can read. But if you reply with “U STFU”, then I’ll just wave hi to the PvP tank with no hand of freedom and no PvP trinket. You’re a real man of genius!

Attendance Blues

Well, we’re swinging around from having slightly too many people to people assuming that since raid signups are always overflowing, to the point where we mark some as “standby”, that means they can blow it off and someone will obviously be around to take their place. Which is only slightly annoying when one or two people do it, but when three or more people do it it completely scotches the raid and leaves a lot of frustration. We don’t demand 100% attendance on raid nights or even 50%, but it kind of screws us when we have no idea if people intend to show up or not.

All this really tells me is what I already knew before, except with putting a greater sense of urgency to it: we need to recruit more, not even to fill out two ten-mans, but to broaden our pool of raiders that we know we can almost certainly count on to be there, on time and not waiting on something else to happen, when they sign up. And that second ten-man will come in time; really I should never have let the realm recruiting thread drop to the point that I did in the first place.

So to all twenty or so of my readers: if you are looking for a raiding home where you aren’t racing for server firsts or even thirds, progression is limited to two nights a week of about three to three and a half hours max, but progression still happens steadily and with a relaxed and good-humored atmosphere, Reprisal of Steamwheedle Cartel is looking for more. Our shiny new recruitment thread lives here.

In other news, Single Abstract Noun and Steelspark the bitty little warrior have been marvelous as a break from raiding, preparing for raids, officering, and so forth. Poor Steel is only level 10 and broke as a very broke thing, mostly because /gchat is usually more interesting and entertaining than killing another Trogg. If you’re looking for a “vacation” server/guild, I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Moving Right Along

Full clear of lower spire in our first night of raiding tonight, in spite of having some people filling in where they normally don’t. (Including Initial V, who we threw way, way into the healing deep end with her two-day-old resto spec. She rose to the occasion admirably.) We’ll move on to do some serious work on Festergut and perhaps Rotface on Sunday, though we’ll be down one of our top DPS and one of the solid middle-benchers; we’ll see if we can make up for it with what we’ve got left. Quite a few people got nice upgrades tonight, so I’m feeling cautiously optimistic.

I think we need to move in to do some serious recruiting. We now seem to have gone from having a surplus of tanks to having no surplus at all, and I really want to move toward that second team even if it’s awkward. If nothing else having a deeper field of more-than-ten will make nights like tonight where we have to rebalance around rotating some people in easier, and it’s really starting to niggle at me that it would be damned nice if me and Ossifer Bear weren’t so goddamn indispensable. I like feeling needed and I’m good at my job, but it would be nice to take a weekend off now and then without having to cancel the raid for it. I know he feels the same. If I have to rotate out now and then when I’d rather not, or spend some time in my very nicely geared but never used DPS set, then so be it.

Growing Pains

I do love my guild, and I really love my raid team. I don’t think I ever want to do 25s, because what I enjoy most about progression raiding is not only the people, but having a small enough environment so that knowing and managing each person’s strengths, weaknesses, and quirks are as important to progression as gear is. It’s widely been observed that in 25s, you can afford to carry a few people who are undgeared, underskilled, undermotivated, or any combination; in a strict 10 man environment where you don’t have a flow of gear overtuned to the content from 25s, everybody must be on their game or success doesn’t happen. Leading the raid is therefore then less a matter of efficiently herding cats than it is effective coaching and intelligent assessment of the abilities and gear you’ve got to work with. (I’m not actually the leader for any raid so much as I am Ossifer Bear or Stingray’s squeaky assistant, but effectively speaking the entirety of the /o channel is handling half of it whenever there’s a raid going.)

At this point, in the category of people I know and can rely on, we have some fantastic melee DPS, awesome hunters who can do all the utility huntery things that seem to be so necessary whenever you’ve got one around, a pleasing selection of tank healers, raid healers, and at least one healer who can bring any of that plus DPS when asked, and overall all the ingredients needed to make some progression while keeping it fun rather than work. On top of that I like working with all of them and am pleased to see their names on signups and online at raid times.

Problem is, there are now more than nine of them. A not-insignificant number more, especially if and when we get our Death Nut back from the health-related leave of absence he’s on. Worse than that, we have several people who rarely seem to get the chance to go at all who aren’t so much bad as they are unlucky or diffident about signups when they see a full list of people, that fully deserve the chance to prove themselves that people who got in earlier and cemented themselves as regular did- them, AND a few people who are finishing their level/gearup process that want to raid when they finish this process, too.

Don’t get me wrong, I would have slashed throats to have this problem six months ago when we were in the process of falling apart or completely fallen apart and couldn’t *buy* puggers to fill out the growing number of holes in our roster. Right now we have all the elements we need for success, and are succeeding every week, we just have human resource complexities and sometimes decisions to make that we don’t want to and that aren’t as easy as we like.

The ultimate best solution, and our next tangible goal, is having two ten-man teams. We have the tanks for it and I *think* we have the healers for it though there are a few question marks there, and we have maybe half the DPS we need depending on how certain things work out, like getting our Death Nut back or not and whether we can find a way to schedule it so that two of our DPS with awkward, punishing work schedules can attend. So technically speaking, the solution is obvious: recruit a few more people, bang out the schedule, and move on to “everyone gets to raid and progression happens” nirvana.

It’s just that thanks to the question marks- like “are these people that I’m counting among those who would be in this team actually able to be”, “who’s going to raid lead this mother”, “when on earth can everybody go”, “how do we mess with our currently very successful tank and healer composition if we have to in order to make this second team viable and give it a good raid leader”, “how do we do this without breaking up committed couples that play together in order to raid together”- that leaves me with a really weaksauce recruiting message, which boils down to “Come join us and you might get to raid every week once we ever figure this shit out, and we have no idea when that’ll be. We promise our benches are made of very soft pine.”

Right now on the realm forums there are two DPS and a healer looking for a home, including a mage, which we currently lack and would very much like to have. We’ve had some good luck in the past recruiting in this fashion- Raid Array, Suicide Dotter, and Thing One and Thing Two are all very solid raiders who we picked up in this fashion. (And there was one disaster that ended in frayed tempers and a /gkick, but overall the ratio is good.) If the attitudes are sound, if the healer is happy raid healing rather than tank healing, they could actually fill out this hypothetical team quite nicely. If, if, if!

My life is SO FULL OF HARDSHIP, I know. QQ for me.

Lower Spire Down

We took out Saurfang in only three attempts tonight, the first time fighting him that wasn’t an accidental Leeroy. (“Let’s just have a look at what’s past this door. Wait, I think we need to talk to Saurfang…”) Not only that, but on the third, successful attempt, we got I’ve Gone And Made A Mess- the DPS were absolute champions at controlling and nuking the Blood Beasts after only a few tries to see how things went. After that, we spent some hilarious time wiping on the Upper Spire trash, then took a “let’s just see” crack at Festergut that involved getting him down to two thirds of his health even though Holy Terror, our lead and best-geared healer, got basically one-shotted during the pull. We are confident we have the stuff to take him down and just need to nail the execution.

I am ridiculously proud of my little herd of kittens right now. We are definitely a casual guild and we do prioritize attitude, temperament, and overall compatibility over gear and availability, but for having as small a core and the kinds of priorities we do we can seriously dial it in when we put our minds to it.

Odds, Ends

- It’s interesting how, due to just being a fairly small guild, the nature of problems experienced can vary from week to week. Week before last we had way more qualified raiders wanting to raid than we had slots and were starting our first serious effort to build up a second team. Last week we got crit hard by real life and had to go to ToC because the only other available tank was only geared for ToC at best for one night, and cancel the other. What happened? One of our core DPS was apparently hospitalized (we still don’t know the whole story there), another’s on a new and punishing work schedule, Holy Terror and Ossifer Bear had sudden family obligations and the same thing happened to Suicide Dotter and Raid Array, our backup healer has a work schedule that means he can’t make almost all regular raid nights, our backup backup healer got snared by work and is now moving across the country and is only spottily available, and our backup backup backup healer has acquired an offline social life, which wouldn’t be an issue if we didn’t raid mainly on weekends. Whew. Priority has suddenly changed from “form second team” to “figure out if we need to completely reorganize the raiding schedule”.

- I’m going to have some adjusting to do when we eventually do form a second team. It’s seriously disorienting to me to tank with someone other than Ossifer Bear. I kept wanting to say things like “No, this is all wrong, bear stands on my RIGHT during this part!” I could not more thoroughly fill a “tanks are control freaks” stereotype if I were actively trying. This is one of many reasons I always have Vent on push-to-talk, though the main reason is that the raid does not need to be subjected to my constant muttered litany of profanity. Holy Terror is PTT for the same reason. Comparing notes with her as to who’s getting cursed about was interesting.

- The minor kerfluffle regarding single-gender guilds was interesting. (I’m linking to Cranky’s roundup so I don’t have to do it myself. Look at the bottom.) For the record, I don’t care if people want to form a guild around the concept of thinking Kirk was better than Picard and only want to associate with other Kirkians, let alone if they want to be in single-gender guilds. What amuses me is mostly the defense that Tristan of the male-only guild advances, which is that men are such cave trolls they have to isolate themselves, lest they inadvertently abuse the female players. I didn’t listen to the actual podcast in question, but apparently the corollary defense is that male players are so disconcerted by working with people that have boobies (which they can’t even see) that separating results in better performance.

Both of these arguments are, to me, like listening to transmissions from the planet Zongo. What the hell kind of maladjusted little boys are these people playing with and why do they tolerate them to the point that they’ll keep themselves hermetically sealed from the opposite sex in order not to set them off? Granted, it could just be that they’re saying this because they think just saying “we like to keep it guys’ night out only and we can’t do that playing with girls” will get them flash-fried, but if you’re going to be in a men-only guild that’s kind of going to happen anyway and it seems oddly nutless to employ such weird logic that inherently disparages their members.

Then again I don’t get a lot of these issues in general. There’s plenty of “girls don’t play WoW” type jokes in our server’s tradechat, and a few female players always bite on it, but it always struck me as being as standard a /trade trope as Chuck Norris, murloc-themed movies, and anal [skill] jokes. We once pugged the raiding alt of SWC’s most notorious tradechat troll*, whose standard repetoire includes plenty of jokes about women and stoves and making him sandwiches, and he didn’t say boo to the female raid leader or any of the other female voices on Vent. Either he’s a coward vocally or, more likely, he just trolls to get reactions from the reactive. It seems incredible to me that anyone actually believes this stuff.

Then again, any male or female player that behaved like either of the stereotypes that both male and female only guilds justify their existence with** would be g-kicked immediately no matter how leet their skills and gear, so maybe this is only more reason why we’re not the top progressed ten-man guild on the server.

*This was *not* when I was in a position to have a say about it, for the record.
**To re-clarify: I think they should exist without having to justify it at all.

Rocket Bear

Screenshot by, and of, Ossifer Bear. Improvised lyrics by Stingray.

Rizz packed my shirt last night pre-flight
Zero hour 8:45 server.
And I’m gonna be high as a kite by then
I miss Thunder Bluff so much, I miss my heals
It’s lonely on the Skybreaker
On such a timeless fight

And I think it’s gonna be a long long time
‘Til touchdown brings me ’round again to find
I’m not the man they think I am at home
Oh, no no no…
I’m a ROCKET BEAR!

ROCKET BEAR! Watch my fuzzy ass sail through the sky!
ROCKET BEAR! If I’m quick Thraps & Laedi might not die!

Icecrown ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids
In fact it’s cold as hell
And there’s traps all over Thraps misses if you did
And all these fights I don’t understand
It’s just my job three days a week
A rocket bear, a rocket bear.

And I think it’s gonna be a long long time
‘Til touchdown brings me ’round again to find
I’m not the man they think I am at home
Oh, no no no…
I’m a ROCKET BEAR!

(Thraps would be Stingray. Rizz is Holy Terror, lead healer and Ossifer Bear’s wife to boot. Laedi is our kitty too new to have a nickname.)