My first raid. . .

I guess technically Onyxia was my first raid, but 6 man-ing vanilla 40 man content doesn't count. Our guild ran the Spider wing of Naxx-10 on tuesday, which we actually completed and it was a full guild run. It was an eye opening experience for a lot of reasons.

Loot drama - We'll get this one out of the way right off the bat. I am not a retribution paladin. I have not leveled retribution since I believe the mid 40's which was over a year ago. My knowledge of retribution is crusader strike, divine storm, and fill in the time in between with whatever. However, that being said, I bought dual spec and went retribution because I figured if I wasn't tanking, I would be able to do something and it was a way to get gear. However, I have very minimal interest in ret gear. I want tank gear. Well, I figured as I leveled prot, run most instances prot, am defense capped prot, prot is my "main" spec. So when I rolled on the prot ring, one of the tanks complained. If I can't get gear, there are easier faster ways to get emblems.

Vent - Never previously used it, wasn't even really sure what it was except a way for people to talk to each other. It was odd hearing peoples' voices that I hadn't heard before. And I guess talking is easier than typing, but apart from raiding, I have no use for it, but I'll leave it installed.

General Impressions - I don't like melee DPS. I LOOOOVE playing my mage, and I love everything about my Dr00d (post about the awesomeness of mangle forthcoming), but I had always seen my paladin as an AoE grinding machine. And maybe thats the problem. I don't feel responsive having to run over to mobs rather than just shift targets. Weapon swings feel slow. I died a few times (not my healers fault, I ascribe to the "If DPS dies, it's their own damn fault" rule). I didn't have a bad time per se, it just wasnt as fun as a lot of other in game activities. I guess I was expecting it to be more grand, not just a harder version of an instance that took more people.

Outlook - I'm severely doubting my paladin is a character to raid with. I am going to give it a few more tries before abandoning it completely, but thats where I'm at now. I honestly don't see the appeal. I think it would be more fun for me on my mage or druid, and I think gearing would be easier on mage or druid. I also think elemental shammy might be fun. I guess I have come to the conclusion I am not a tank, I am an AoE grinder that's level capped in better gear. That still leaves DPS and/or healing and who knows, I might really take to Druid tanking.

the AAAA player. . .

For those of you not familiar with the way baseball works, before a player is deemed "ready" for the majors, they go through a progression of minor leagues. These are graded in quality from A being the lowest level to AAA, the highest level of the minors. However, there are sometimes players who, while being successful in AAA, are not successful at the major league level. These players are often referred to as AAAA (quadruple A) players. I am starting to get the impression I am a quadruple A player in Wow.

I have no problems leveling, farming, running instances at lower levels, all the way up to heroic. Not just as a paladin, deathknight, mage, druid, I've run with them all, and in level appropriate groups, no problems. Once things go heroic, I wilt like a featherweight in the ring with 80's Tyson.

I think part of it may be my mindset. I don't want to kite. I want an instance version of AoE grinding. The boss should be beating on me, the healer healing me, with me generating aggro and DPS burning him down. That might get boring to some others, I like it just fine.

My guild is running Naxx 10 tonight. I am going to participate in the fail. . .er. . .attempt. I say fail because we tried a different 10 man (one of the "easy" ones) and were just crushed. We have some players in the guild who are really good and know their class. We just don't have 10 of them who can run at once and fill every role that needs filled.

This leads me to a curious question. What do I do? My current combination of skills and gear will not carry me. If I can barely get through the first boss of H UK (with 2 wipes on "trash") heroic tanking is not presently a job I can handle. A naxx 10 drop might help, the AC head enchant will help, but these are small improvements. Do I focus on the Druid, get through outlands as fast as I can, and start the process over again? Wow itself is still fun for me. The "progression" game is not.

My weekend. . .

First of all, Happy Father's Day to any and all that it applies to (One of my kitties coughed up a hairball for me, not the Father's Day gift I was expecting, but as I have no human children, I guess thats what I get). I had dinner with my Dad, stepmom and little brother last night, it was a fun time, but I ate way too much and consequently didn't feel that well last night.

Had a hockey game sunday where we absolutely destroyed the other team. It felt particularly good since them not being able to play last week is what screwed us into a double header back to back (the guy who runs the league plays goalie for them). I moved up from defense and played center the 3rd period and most of our better players said I really seemed to click there. When playing defense, I'm a little more tentative because if a guy gets by me, he's alone with the goalie. When I play on offense, I can chase down their defensemen, harass them in the corners and really make them work to bring it up. If they get by me, oh well, there are at least 2 defensemen behind me. I pretty much single-handedly tied up 2 of the other team's better players behind the net a few minutes apiece.

In wow, my weekend was productive and yet not. I did run a few things on my mage. Ran blackrock depths a few times (got shoulders and staff) and sunken temple which was horribly frustrating. I had pretty much all the quests for ST and the group that I was in COMPLETELY BIPASSED THE AREA WITH THE QUESTS!!! Yeah, I got the pants off the prophet and the quest for his head, but I would have been better off grinding on furbolgs. Still, I am right up on level 55, so outlands is just a hop, skip and a jump away. My druid hit level 50, so I picked up mangle and due to a slight miscalculation with the talent tree, I won't get tree form till 51 (yay feral/resto dual spec). I love my druid, I havent gotten a chance to use mangle yet (I pretty much dinged, then had other things to do), but that should be fun. I tried to re-spec w/o thick hide, but I couldn't really make the numbers work, and since I intend this guy to be mostly a bear tank/tree at 80 anyways, figured I may as well keep it.

I say not productive because my paladin did almost nothing over the weekend. I went to bed super early on friday (I guess I was worn out) so I missed my dailies. I didn't do any instances either as DPS or tanking. I basically did my dailies and leveled alts. Not a bad weekend, just not very productive. I am wondering what to do with my jewelcrafting tokens. I have already bought the tanking ring, tanking neck, stam dragon eye, green tanking gem (stam & +def), and a gem for my druid (AGI and stam). There are a few diff caster gems, but my mage won't really benefit from them for some time (I refuse to use blue gems on a non 80, waste of $$), so I'm a little stuck.

Not a very action packed weekend (not necessarily a bad thing), hope everyone else had a nice one as well!

on 5 man teams

I was talking to our GM last night about a post he wrote here. I suggest you read it because it's highly informative and echoes a sentiment a lot of people have had recently. There are just too many people being carried through content, getting cheap easy gear, and then using that gear as a crutch to carry them further. It is almost a self perpetuating cycle.

It got me to thinking about hockey again. I think Wow and hockey have a lot in common. They are both team based activities (I'm talking 5 mans here, I guess the analogy holds true to raiding, its just a bigger team), where the team functioning together as a whole is more important than the individual parts and weaknesses in key positions cause defeat to the team. If an instance run can't do enough damage before the tank dies, that group loses. If a team doesn't score enough to support their goalie, they lose. In hockey, I know what level I can play up to. When I play at this level, the games are challenging, but I make the saves more often than not and my team still has a good chance to win. When I skate out, I play in a lower division because frankly, I'm just not as good skating out as I am in goal, I don't shoot very well, so I am weak in a key area that can be exposed at higher difficulty levels. Imagine if one day, for participating in a game, I was rewarded with an amazing stick that was better than most everyone else's on my team and allowed me to shoot on par with the better players in the division.

Suddenly I can shoot (even though it's the stick, and not me learning proper technique), and since I got this awesome stick, maybe I'll play up a division and try for some skates that make me skate faster. Now, I've just gotten the ability to skate and shoot purely from new gear, why would I bother practicing technique? I can play well above the level I would normally be able to play at with these items alone.

Obviously, that example is preposterous. I play at the level that my skills allow me to. Occasionally I will play in a level I consider "easy" either because I enjoy hockey or a team needs a fill in. I practice to get better, but even with the best gear out there, I would never be able to keep up with a pro player in crappy 2nd hand gear. In Wow, this is not the case. Put me in Ulduar purples and an elite tank in white gear, and I will completely outclass them. Why does Wow encourage gear hoarding over skill developement?

Part of me says "don't worry about it, it doesn't really affect you. People who want to play that way pay their $15 the same as you do." I guess they're not really hurting me, but it bugs me. I felt the anguish in TBC when I hit the level cap and realized it was like being level 1 again. I ground reputation to get keyed for the heroics and even with a well geared group, upper level instances were HARD, there were wipes and CC was mandatory. I feel like I've developed skill an experience and people who get carried through a couple naxx runs for some gear and then think their l33t because of it just feels wrong. I guess I want to respect people who are more "progressed" than me, but more often than not, I just can't.

On a more positive note, I am doing some skills work myself this weekend. I'm going to be tanking some guild runs through the easier heroics, not so much for gear (for me at least, the only instance that has much of anything for me is heroic Utgarde Pinnacle), more to get experience running heroics with our team. I'm looking forward to it. Even if we wipe and things don't go that smoothly, I know why I play. I enjoy spending time with my guildies and contributing to the group.

The level cap: Beginning of the game or Retirement?

This is my first extended experience with the Wow "endgame". Although I was level 70 before WotLK hit, it was only by a few months, and I didn't even really have enough time to get geared to tank heroics. This time is different as I'm at the defense cap and have reasonable beginning levels of HP and Armor, tanking heroics is actually an option. What I have been considering is whether or not its an option worth pursuing?

My normal routine goes something like this: Go to JC trainer, get JC daily; Fly to Argent Tournament, mine anything along the way, get lumberjack and kill scourge dailies; Fly to Shadow Hold, get 3 Ebon Blade dailies (the one where you shoot down the dragons is about my fav daily EVER!!); complete dailies; turn in; log into an alt. I do 6 dailies which take about a half hour and go level my alts. I just dont have any desire to run heroics, I've been trying to consider why.

A guildie last night was looking for a tank to run heroic Violet Hold (which I despise, but I'll get into that in a minute). I decided "hey, there are pants for me potentially in there, I can at least get some badges and help out a guildie." I'd run it before on reg, just seemed like a lot of running around between portals a la black morass, no biggie. But two things remove my desire to ever run it again: A) if you die, you have to re-do everything up to that point, and B) there is a boss in there that requires pulling around the room. I don't want to run anyone around the room. Turn him away from the group, fine. Dodge out of the way of the knockout blow that deadly boss tells me is coming, fine. Hit space bar repeatedly while tanking, annoying but acceptable. Run him around the room? Nuh uh. I've heard there's a raid boss that requires a wow equivalent of the thriller dance, I don't want to do that either. Since I'm unwilling to jump through blizz's hoops, should I be doing endgame content in the first place?

I was super motivated to get to 80, I thought it would open all these doors for me. Really I'm finding it is more like retirement. Sure my pally comes out to do some consulting, does some jewelcrafting for himself and others, but really he flies around, collects his social security and sits around, mostly unused. Its kind of sad, me original character is in retirement and doesn't even know it.

Best PUG ever and other weekend errata. . .

Well, I had some vacation from work last week and after getting over my rather serious virus issue, I could think of nothing better to do than spend the majority of the week playing Wow (yes, thats a vacation for me, no work, and a lot less expensive than the beach vacation I'd origingally planned). The time was well spent and even a fun random gankings in the Hinterlands couldn't spoil my fun (Mage getting hit with a Titansteel destroyer, I couldn't even catch the name of the guy who killed me, bang, I'm dead).

First of all, I can't recall the day (they kind of merged together) but I was a part of the best PuG possibly in the history of Wow. OK, I'm embellishing a little bit there, but this was so much fun I can't remember enjoying playing my mage this much (and I enjoy my mage quite a bit). It started with me leveling my druid in the Swamp of Sorrows. I got a whisper from someone asking if I wanted to DPS for Zul'Farrak. Although I know how to kitty DPS, I really see my druid as tank (and heals once I dual spec) for instances, kitty for leveling. However, I am leveling my mage specifically to run instances (all that AoE goodness shouldn't go to waste). I asked if theyd be ok taking my mage instead (who granted was a lil high to run ZF, but I wanted the staff from there pretty badly). They added me and it was awesome!!! The group averaged about level 50, heals were good, tank was good, and they basically gathered up mobs for me to AoE. It was such a good run, it went faster than I can solo it on my pally. The highlight of the run was when the tank decided to see if he could run to the bottom of the stairs with all the mobs and we could kill them all there. He gathered, I blizzarded, lots of numbers, mobs dead. I also got the mask and staff from the runs (we did it over a couple times because it was fast and fun).

In other non-Wow related news, I was happy to see the Lakers win the NBA championship (I became a Lakers fan living in San Diego in the late 80's), and not-Detroit win the Stanley Cup. I'm not really a Penguins fan, but I HATE Detroit so given a choice between Detroit and virtually anyone else (Detroit vs NJ would be tough, I have hatred for both).

One other wow note, whomever thought it would be cute to roll a pink pigtailed gnome warrior on the server I play alliance on with the same name as my main, its not. I can't really claim identity theft as wow characters don't have social security numbers, and most of my other alts' names are duplicated repeatedly. That's all there is to say about that.

Gear: the means or the end?

We lost another 80 in the guild yesterday, and I cant say Im sorry to see him go. His comment on leaving (Im paraphrasing) "I met some dude in barrens, he said his guild could one shot all the bosses in naxx and theyd farm it for me, I want to get my t8 set, peace". Ive read a lot about "charity purples" but this is taking it to a whole new level, and it bothered me.

It has nothing to do with a dead-weight douchebag leaving the guild. He was a mage, and not that good of one, we have 2-3 others who are better, and I would say could take his place, but really, they are what he would be aspiring to anyways. I view our guild as a group of mostly friends who get together for a common goal. The overwelming majority, I think of as friends, and I help out in any way that I can. Lately, I have been crafting gear for people as I have a high level jewelcrafter and blacksmith. Sure, I want to upgrade my gear, but lets be honest, its not like there is a ton of new content coming out soon and Im not exactly a hardcore progression player.

I see gear as something that happens, yeah there are a few pieces I want, but if I wasnt trying to get geared up to tank heroics and raids, it would be irrelevant. I would never try to tell someone how to play their class, and admittedly, DPS is something Im not super knowledgable about, but Im not aware of any "gear checks" for DPS. There isnt the equivalent of the defense cap (maybe hit cap for casters, but it doesnt seem super hard to get there). How much new content is going to be released in the near future? How many times do you really want to run through ulduar? And if a guild is good enough to one shot the bosses in naxx, what do they need a random mage for?

To me, gear is a means, it is a tool. Obviously, Im not naked tanking any dungeons in the near future. I wonder how many people really see it that way. . .