Gitr Knows WoW

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.

The grip that WoW may have ever held on me is gone. There are still things I want to do, but doesn’t seem like there will be time. I’d like to get good gear and see BWL and Onyxia, but who has 4 hours a night to play? I used to. I used to come home and get on around 4pm and get off around midnight, give or take. Some nights were out, but those that I was home, I was on WoW.

Gitr, what’s changed? Several things changed recently. First, I moved out of my parents’ house. Now I can watch TV when I want, I can read where I want, and I can play computer as long as I want. My roomie has the entire Firefly series on DVD. I have been watching those. Then I’ll watch the movie. Then I want to watch the entire Godfather set. I’ve never seen any of the Godfathers. *blush* We have HD cable. There is a pool and a weight room.

I have a girlfriend. I believe it takes more time to have a girlfriend than a wife. I know that seems wrong, but here is the simple thought in my simple pea brain. Sleeping is considered quality time. If you go to bed at 10pm or something reasonable, that’s a good 7-9 hours of time “together.” Dinner together is a given and never inconvenient, because you’re both there. No one ever has to go home, so there’s travel time cut out of previously wasted time. Watch some TV together, maybe a movie, find something quiet that you want to do alone, together, and you’re set. It’s not that simple with a girlfriend. Sure, it’s easier after a few years, but the hours we are together have to literally be together. When get my own time, it’s not like it’s automatically WoW time.

Since I can’t just jump into a MC run or fly down to ZG and start fighting, my schedule needs to coincide with others’. Since I don’t belong to a large, hardcore raiding guild that can let me just log in and take down Onyxia, Gitr has been sitting around IF while Priestr gets going on Sen’jin. The only thing that keeps me from playing Priestr more is a lack of funds. Sometimes I just want to wait for my auctions to sell so I can train or buy mats to train skills. Sure, I could grind or quest, but there’s Mythbusters, Numb3rs, and Law & Order. I have 3 books I want to read, along with one that I’m reading for fun, one I’m reading with my girlfriend, and more that I want to buy.

I could save $15/mo and just stop playing, but then I wouldn’t have anything to blog about. I love blogging. Maybe it’s time to start a Priestr blog. Grimr’s lonely, too, but Kargath is getting to be such a pain to log in to. Anyway, enough rambling for now, but I just don’t want to be at work today. 🙂

Priestr hit level 20 and went on a Deadmines PuG spree. It took 3 attempts until I was able to get into a Van Cleef-ready group and didn’t have anyone decide to log off to go eat, sleep, etc.

In the early evening I got into a group that was suprisingly good considering there were 2 players in there who’d never been to DM. How that still happens today, I don’t know 🙂 It was a 16 warrior and mage, 18 mage, 19 warlock, and me. Four squishies and a tank. To my credit, no one died. Ever. Well, at least until the warlock decided he wanted to eat and hearthed 2 minutes before fighting the room full of goblins and the shredder elite. We wiped and I called it, because we weren’t going to make it too much further with that group composition and experience.

After 9pm, I tried again and got Gnomicidal to join me with a group of 3. Again, it was 4 squishies, but this time it was 2 priests instead of 3 dps players. The other priest was level 23/24, so I handled healing while he did damage. Our stickiest non-wipe was against the shredder. It got all the way down to me, without mana, and the goblin driver being at 27 health before my stave whacked him across the nose and killed him. It’s quite fun to rez an entire party after saving the wipe. /chuckle

We wiped going down the spiral ramp when we accidently aggroed the boss goblin while taking out the dude under the ramp. We proceeded to Van Cleef without incident after that and Priestr was honored to be allowed to hit Need on Cookie’s Stirring Rod when others hit pass or Greed. Apparently being a healer gives one a certain amount of respect in a group. Actually, we took down VC, and then everyone but Gnomicidal died. He made it to the wheel to reset. On the way back, I died from a patrol. On the next attempt, we grouped and ran together. I kept falling asleep and running into walls. If it wasn’t for the rail in the spiral ramp room, I would have fallen all the way down. Next thing I know after passing into the cave with the ship, I’m in the water. I aggroed some murlocs on shore and died under water. They couldn’t find my body. On the way back in the 3rd time, EVERYTHING had repopped. I never got VC’s head or note. That means I get to do it all again! Go Staff of Westfall!

I suppose I remember the groups with a good healer not because of the healing itself, but a lack of corpse runs and never needing to watch my health. In good groups with Gitr, I’m usually watching my rage and the priest’s mana more than anything. I think that being a warrior first makes me a better priest than I’d be otherwise, because I know what I liked and need as a tank, which is bottom line: never worry about my health. I need to know that I can aggro 2-4 mobs and stay standing because if I get that many mobs on me, the priest only needs to heal one person. That sure did make my job easier last night, until we started nuking too much to get done. Then it was multiple flash heals and a big heal on the tank, bubble the mages, heal the tank, and so on.

I’ve updated Priestr’s RPG profile.

Our 4,000th visitor came to us from Cheyenne, WY by way of Hogit’s blog.

Thursday night, I’m in Stormwind, and I get a /whisper “Hello fellow Tampanian.” Now if that doesn’t get your attention in-game, nothing will. A few exchanges later, I find out it’s a guy who reads my blog almost every day, and I even guessed which of the 2 companies he works for because of the SiteMeter logs. It was pretty cool. He put up a blog so he could join our bloggers’ guild. His toon is Gnomicidal, and we’ll give him props up on the link list when he gets some game content going for this toon. Glad to have you on board.

I logged in Saturday morning and started to grind to get some levels in before our guild run. I hit level 17 in Redridge and 18 during the run.

Backtracking a bit, I was in Redridge on Friday and noticed a Call To Arms post about a mage wanting to go to DM, so I answered with my lvl, class, and interest in going. I joined his group, and 3 seconds later, he said, “nm, I’m going to do BGs instead,” and left the group… of 2. So there I am on a grif to Westfall for nothing. I get there and decided to take out some gnolls to finish my paws quest, and he invites me and, lo, there is a lvl 27 warrior in the group. Hot ding dog, I started running for Moonbrook. I met up with the warrior and we ran in to start killing. Here is where it gets good.

We get a  /whisper from the mage saying to wait until he got done with the BGs to go in. I mouse over his profile and saw that he was in WSG. Smithey replied that we were just going to clear the way to the instance. I made out pretty good on the loot and greens. He said he was the guy’s guildie and that this was a 5th request to help him out. After Smithey told him twice that he only had a few minutes before quitting on the mage, I told the idiot to be more considerate of this group and hearth out and get his butt down here. A minute or so later, he left the group, so I asked Smithey if he wanted to continue, and he said he was so pissed, he wanted to take it out on the elites in the instance. I was all for that. We killed the goblin shredder and into the spiral goblin room before he decided to get on with his life. That was sure fun, because I actually had to heal him and he had to rip agg back off me when I would crit heal on him.

Back to Saturday, we had a bit of a hiccup in forming the group. There were 6 of us online; less than 2 groups, but more than we could take in. It became quite the “hmmm…what do we do to be fair” discussion.

More in the morning.