First Day Playing WoW (Day 3)

*cough* I think I might've missed a few days here, but hey, I didn't have to do these sequentially.

So, my first day playing WoW - it was July of 2007. I know this because July is when my company goes on a summer-shutdown meaning the offices close and everyone takes two weeks off to go do other stuff. As programmers, we usually use this time to do a lot of testing while all the users are gone without fear of breaking something but for whatever reason that year I remember not having a lot to do so I worked from home quite a bit.

Tanking: Then And Now

I've been thinking about class balance lately as I look at my own raid team and I thought back to my raiding career over the last couple of years. This is going to be a bit long and rambling, but hopefully productive. :-)

When I started raiding, I was very good friends with a Holy Paladin who healed my bear through all the TBC heroics, Kara and Z'A. A Holy Paladin/Bear combo was pretty beastly in TBC raiding. Bears had massive armor and health (more than any other class) and Holy Paladins could keep spot healing them all day long. Back then, we were the only class that would eat Crushing Blows (unless one of the shield tanks missed keeping a buff up) and the Paladin would just land a big heal to cover it. We could keep a boss going till enrage fairly easily. During this time my tanking partners rotated a lot but I raided a lot with another paladin tank (who were strictly AoE or main tanks and made terrible off-tanks just due to the amount of agro that Holy Shield generated.)

Home Again

My brief hiatus from Warcraft was a very good thing. I feel refreshed and alert and excited to play again. The game is interesting again, and logging back into Stormwind after 11 days felt like coming home from vacation - you miss the time off, but you're also glad to wrap familiar blankets around yourself.

I immediately picked up the Fishing, Cooking and Jewelcrafting dailies and did them, before guildies logged in and we did a random or two and then some chit-chat later, I logged off. Tuesday and Wednesday we raided, much much much more successfully than the last few weeks when we struggled with easy bosses, we just sort of steamrolled past content that would give us a pause even two weeks ago like Maloriak or Atramedes.

Last night, we even picked up our first kill of Valiona and Theralion after three pulls, once a PuG helped us refine our strat a little bit and we managed to recruit a couple of them into the guild. I don't know why we put the drakes off for so long - such an easy fight. And we're going back in tonight to see if we can wrap up Chimeron once and for all, while getting some time in on Ascendant Council.

Burnout

It's funny how fast things can go from being okay to just total crap.

This week's raids have been the worst in months. Struggling to get even simple bosses down, and just a total lack of communication until I have to ask the same question eight times to get answers from people. The kind of nights you just want to end. And then after an hour of trying to pull things together, someone's connection craps out and you just want to log out and never log in again.

So I called raid, and told everyone I was canceling raids for next week as well. We'll regroup on the 15th - with whoever doesn't leave the guild by then - and see how things go from there. I'm also going to just not log in during this time and try to focus on other stuff. I have a lot of writing on my plate anyway.

Xariona? I hardly knew her.

Late Saturday night, I was farming on my warrior, my friend Thistle was committing mass genocide against Crocolisks to fill her Money Bin with gold, our resident Resto druid was leveling her fishing and our Shadow Priest was leveling his Death Knight in Deepholm.

It was a sleepy night, not much chatter going on, everyone was doing their own thing, as it was close to 2 AM. Suddenly the green chat lights up, "Rare in DH," says the Death Knight, "Get down here now!"