Gitr

I found this link on another blog and found it to be an interesting topic:

More than a Pretty Face

I find it interesting because as a noob, most players assume if you come across a female toon, the person behind it is also female. It’s only natural to call someone’s RL personage by the gender you first encountered them as.

FoA has one notorious male player with multiple female avatars. In my mind, that’s just plain wierd. The only good explanation I’ve heard for it from a guy is: “If I’m going to be staring at a butt for 6-8 hours a day, I’d like it to be a nice-looking one.” At least that makes sense, even if it is brash and immature.

I can also see it for women under the condition that they want to be left alone from males with the rude, sexist comments, etc. that some guys seem to like receiving as female toons. I know several RL women who’ve had problems with guys in chat and TeamSpeak that probably wish they could turn their toons into guys and erase people’s memory that they ever knew their true gender.

Anyway, neat write-up and an interesting topic to me.

I don’t want to write about WoW today. Priestr hit 25 last night and went into Stockades and was group leader. It went very well.

What I want to talk about is spiders. Particularly the ones that freak my girlfriend out. I have good news for the whole world: she killed her first spider yesterday… in the car.

She got in the car and as she was leaving the parking lot, it started to dangle and sway from the top of the windshield, on the INSIDE of the car. That’s how she said it. Like it was the worst thing that could happen that day. So, she is trying to get her sandal off to get it as it scurries back and forth, but then it disappeared. She was so freaking out that she had to pull over at a Publix store and wait for it, thinking the whole time that it could start crawling on her at any second. Then it reappeared and she grabbed the very bottom of the sandal and squashed it with the very top. It was an amazing tale to hear.

I was able to manage my composure clear up until the VERY end and totally lost it. It was the funniest story I’d heard in months and I laughed and coughed for about 2 minutes. 21 years old and never killed a spider. She always ran to her dad, brother, or me to get them. That just cracks me up.

I guess now’s not the time to tell her that I can’t find the spider that I saw in my bathroom this morning.

Fellowship of Azeroth took down Garr on our first attempt ever. Because of my schedule on Sundays, I can only join in on the second leg every other week. Well, this was the day to go, and it rocked. The A-team took down Luci and Mag, which was something we couldn’t dream about the last time I came on a run. Now it was time to go for Gehennas and Garr.

I’ve got a good Priestr update, but that will just have to wait until this account is over. We actually started within 5 minutes of target time with 38 raiders. I noticed several of our long-standing members have joined other guilds, but remain in fellowship with us. My favorite paladin got a great upgrade tonight, too, even though he’s with a raiding guild now.

Unlike the last 2 MC runs I was on, I didn’t die in the first fight, nor were there ANY bad pulls. That was a nice change. I died in the 2 boss fights, and that’s it. I would have been fine in both fights with better armor, but that will come.

In the 3 attempts on Gehennas in my only run with a shot at him, we wiped every time. This time, most of the group was battle-hardenend and we took him down on the first try. He dropped some nice stuff as I drooled over one of the Warrior pieces.

We made our way to Garr for our first attempt ever and it took FOREVER to set up. It was just a bunch of hunters grabbing the leader’s assist to mark each add, then the warlocks took the assist to banish the other 3. I kept falling asleep. Worried that I’d run into Garr, I folded my hands over my stomach to take a nap with the headphones on. After about 30-40 minutes, we initiated combat. My job was to follow our epic-geared rogue from add to add and take them down. Every time they exploded or whatever the do, I’d be thrown back 50 feet and get knocked down to about 30% health. After about 2 minutes, we started chopping away at Garr.

This was going along just fine. Everyone was alive and at full health and Garr’s health just kept dropping. 67%, 54%, 30%, and on down. Being a melee class, I have no idea what happened around 24%, but I got thrown twice as far as before and was dead. Gitr died a spectacularly fast death, along with half the raid group. At that point, I think all the adds had exploded or something, because those remaining were just going after Garr. Tank after tank died as the healers tried to keep one up as they gained aggro.

25k health, 19k, 12k, 6k… “go, team, go!!” There were about 5 people standing and Garr stood at 6k for a very long time. Next thing you know, he exploded and everyone started shouting. We looked at the groups, and EVERYONE was dead. No…wait. Shinryu has a soulstone available. With the whole raid dead, Shin rezzed, and started to rez the healers, and in 5 minutes we looted the body.

Loot from MC 3:

Gehennas:

Lawbringer Gauntlets
Sabatons of Might 

Garr:

Nightslayer Cover
Lawbringer Helm
Brutality Blade

OK, people, there are obviously a few things you need to know about grouping. I know this is preaching to the choir for most of you, but good grief, save everyone in the group trouble and don’t accept an invite if you’re going to do stupid stuff.

Last night I tried for 15 minutes to get into PuGs for Stockades to get going on the Defias questline after killing Van Cleef. I had to talk a hunter into letting me in. He was level 24 and had a level 25 rogue with him. I got one good mage I’d grouped with before into it at level 25, and we sent an invite for a 31 priest who was on her way.

There are standards to 5-man groups:

• If you are a n00b, at least let the leader know, if not the whole group. Then they can advise you on what happens in that instance. In most cases, the rest can even adjust and be ready for your n00bishness.
• If you might have to leave, say that up front. Nothing is worse than spending an hour going in and not being able to finish everyone’s quest because of one person. If there’s a real-life issue or emergency, those are understandable and the group will just be disappointed, not pissed.
• If you see a green drop, hit Greed unless you want to wear it then or within a level or so. In the case of equipping, select Need and let others know the first time to feel out the group. 99% of groups will tell you that’s fine and keep the extra info to yourself.
• No looting for friends or alts unless you ask the whole group before making your selection.
• Use people’s names or shortened versions of them. Don’t keep calling people warrior or healer.
• Don’t pull without people being at full mana!!
• Don’t pull too many mobs or be stupid with your positioning so you do a body pull from pats in the middle of the fight.
• Pull mobs off the squishies ASAP. Don’t make them cry for help.
• Don’t keep asking the healer for healing. Over and over again. Here is an example:

My leaving came after telling them 3 times that they don’t need to ask for heals. I told them that I’d either heal them or I was out of mana. All they have to do is look, not type an idiotic request for healing when that is impossible. In this case, Lorenna is the other priest, more than capable of fading, bubbling, or killing the 2 mobs she had on her, but the others were too busy working on one mob than come help her. This also came after my repeated requests to not pull until I was at full mana. Brenie could confirm I asked about 10 times in the course of 15 minutes. The last response I had in this hallway was, “priest, we ARE FINE.” Fine. Die then. Idiot. Hearth. /ignore.

It took 8 rooms for us to wipe. Now was that becuase we were fine, or they were just dang lucky they had someone to heal their numbskulls? I’m not saying I’m the best priest out there for my level, but no one dies when it’s even a moderately bad situation. All hell has to break loose before any group I’ve been in wipes. In 10 DM runs, I’ve been in 3 wipes and all were because of bad pulls. In those runs, how many have died? 16. All of us 3 times and a level 11 pet that had 2 mobs on it. I have the Lavishly Jeweled Ring, Cookie’s Stirring Rod, Corsair’s Overshirt, and the Emberstone Staff from Deadmines. That’s all the blue drops from all the bosses in DM. And someone thinks they need to tell me they need healing? Get out of my group. Oh, it’s not my group? C’ya.

Now I have to ask myself, “do I like beating the tar out of things to piss them off more than keeping an entire group healthy that is taking a beating?”

Well, for one thing, I like the point of view a priest has more than tanking with something in my face, not being able to see the fight. I like that nearly all of my actions are done with 3 mouse buttons and an occassional Alt or Shift thrown in there for effect, and that I’m no longer going from target to target to say, “here I am, hit me.” I sit there and use the middle button for Renew, left button for a quick heal (Flash or Lesser), right button for a bubble, and use shift-click for a full-blown heal.

I turned off the UI’s group portraits, so now it’s just my healer’s UI that controls healing, damage, and buffs. I can target team members and their targets from there. I NEVER have to run around when things go bad to save someone.

I’m finding it super rewarding to keep everyone at full health, keep running along without a death, and get people’s total reliance on my skills to keep them alive for the next fight. If there is another healer in the group, I politely ask them to only do renews and I’ll take care of the rest unless I run out of mana.

I think healing may suit me even better than Gitr did. I just never thought of the possibility because priests wear CLOTH!! They can’t take anything. I guess if you count my bubble, I have almost 900 health, so it’s not as bad as it might seem, and after my level 22 shopping spree, I have around 1500 mana. I can’t wait to heal some more.

It will be interesting to see how many of my fellow bloggers are enjoying their new roles with the alts more than their main role. When we started, we made a rule that no one could pick the class of their main that they blog about. It’s kinda funny in the guild, though, because I still get called ‘Gitr.’ LOL. So how about it? Your main or your Sen’jin alt?

Wow!! That was fun! I was a healer for 2 consecutive Van Cleef runs. They were likely my most enjoyable experiences with the possible exception of mid- to upper-50 level instances. There was cooperation, good tactics, and good loot.

In what was my favorite PuG EVER, I got the supreme compliment:

Now, what was it that brought that out? We had a nice 5-man going with a somewhat flakey, but not sucky paladin as our tank. She was doing weird stuff like loot problems (not really ninja-like) and running into a room to pull something when we had 2 hunters and a mage. Then she busts out with this ON THE RAMP in the Goblin Foundry:

Right before a pull…”bedtime.” I mean, GAHH!! Moron!! Get a brain and use it next time. So, I believe it’s on this pull that we finally wipe for the first time. Correction, the first time we have anyone go below 46% health. We had about 4 engineers and their robots on us and we got them down to one engineer badly hurt before we wiped. The compliment came while running back in together to kill off the pats that respawned.

We didn’t have any trouble until we pulled a noob mistake and were all standing on the platform next to the ship when the patrol walked by on the deck. Van Cleef was an easy fight, considering we 4 manned it and no one was over level 24. The owl was actually level 13 at the time. *grins* They brought a new pet into an instance. LOL. I was really hoping the group leader had a blog so I could send him a guild invite, but he didn’t have one of any kind. 🙁

I turned in the head and went to SW to put stuff up in the AH and got a whisper about helping do VC. I told them I just did it and had to get up in 3 hours. When I got to SW, I noticed that I still had 5k XP to go for level 22…hmmm…what to do? I checked Call to Arms to see if there were any zergs of DM going on. I saw one with a 30 hunter that was calling out for a healer. I asked if they had a full party, and they did, except healer. Once invited, I saw the guy that whispered me. I whispered him back again and said, “This doesn’t even count as a run.” We had a 30 hunter, 24 hunter, 23 hunter, 17 warrior, and me at 21/22. It went FAST, and I got the Lavishly Jeweled Ring from the goblin boss in the foundry.

So, now that I was level 22, I went and trained, bought cool clothes, and logged for the night after I DE’d everything to put the essences up for sale.