To play with friends

My subscription ran out December 20th. I don't think I'd even logged in to check auctions for a few days before that.

I'm not renewing it. At least, not right now.

I've got other things I'm working on - my other massively nerdy hobbies, wrestling with the paperwork surrounding a transfer to the local state university, life with my husband, finally picking my major. And while I was thinking about all this stuff - and about how much I enjoy MMO gaming - I realized something. It's not fun unless I'm playing with my friends.

Why did I love repeatedly running Stratholme and Scholomance 5s at 60? Because I was doing it with friends. What made me get into raiding and raid-leading? It was something to do with my friends. Why did I stay in Legion and wipe on easy bosses in Black Temple instead of jumping ship and walking into Sunwell? Because I had more friends where I was than where I would have gone.

Why did I spend non-school nights for several weeks running staying up until 7 AM? Because at the time, that was when my friends were online.

Why did I buy this game in the first place?

My friends were playing it.

Why don't I like playing anymore? ...Because so FEW of my friends play it. Pugging normal 85 dungeons is torturous. Playing the economy holds no interest for me. I could join a guild and make new friends, but that cuts into the whole "having a life outside the computer desk" thing I've got going on. Twice-weekly practices for Massively Nerdy Hobby (tm) mean raid night options are the nights I'm going to be doing homework.

Man, I dunno where I'm even going with this anymore.

According to the nifty online auction tool thing, I've got about 500g of sold auctions I ought to clean out of assorted mailboxes. And then there's the RP story on Moon Guard I'm going to have to essentially abandon. My inner two-year-old is rebelling against the concept of spending $15 to log in for the half-hour it would take to wrap things up. And there's so many cooler things I can spend that $15 on...

Anyway, it's time for me to get some food and drive up to one of those practices. It's snowing lightly, so the trip shouldn't run me much more than 2 hours. I'll have time to re-tape my polearm and maybe do some knitting while I wait for everyone else to get there.

I'm gonna go play with my friends.

How to get kicked out of any group I'm in

- Zone in and type GOGOGOGOGOGO.

- Face-pull things to 'encourage' me to pull faster.

- Stand in The Bad on a boss fight, die, and then start demanding a rez in all caps before we're out of combat. Then refuse to run back.

- Come un-repaired, have your main weapon break halfway through the run, and refuse to zone out or hearth to repair.

- Link damage meters in party chat at any point, ever. EVER.

- Try and heap blame for a groupfail on one person in particular. The target is almost always the person on the bottom of the damage meter. (Argh wtf damage meters in a leveling instance!)

- Ignore the kill order.

- Ignore the kill order, pull aggro, and then whine when I let you die. (I give a disclaimer at the start of every instance regarding this.)

- Annoy me or any of my guildmates. Yes, broad definition of what counts as annoying and all that, but we do have the enforceable right to not be graced by your presence.

Any and all of these will make the gnome cry.

Last-Minute Prep

Characters above 60:

-Winnow out the ones I'm not going to play, like the RAF'd toons on Sen'jin sitting at 61.
--Double-check their banks for old-world mats to sell for ridiculous quantities of gold.
-Of the ones I *am* going to play, make sure they have at least 250g on hand for Flight Master's License.
-Agonize over who I'm leveling to 85 first. (Probably Itsie. If not, then Kolfinna once she's transferred.)


All characters:

-Check bags and banks for old-world mats. Put on AH.
-Vendor old gear sets that have no sentimental value.
-Run out of things to do.

Lastly:

-Study for finals. Figure out what to do for photography portfolio. Panic. Eat breakfast.

How to Be Prepared (tm) for an expansion: Part 2

Server by server: Turalyon

I'll start with the character most likely to be my main in Cataclysm - Itsie, the gnome warrior. Her inscription and herbalism are both maxed out and she's all set to start making money selling flowers to worgen rerolls on Dec. 7th. What else was there to do for her?

Gear check

She has full outfits for both protection and fury, all gemmed and enchanted. Some of it's outdated, but since she'll replace it inside a month I'm not too worried.

Gold check

286g. Woops. I had to spend most of my 2,000g buffer on gemming up her tank set for the next item on the list...

Achievement check

Itsie is my Kingslayer, as of the night before the Shattering patch. WOOHOO! I also completed the 50 minipet achievement and got my little skunk buddy.

Itsie is pretty much finished as a toon for the expansion. How about Gersemi the priest?

Gear check

Uhhh...well, she has three pieces of PVP gear (one Satin, one Mooncloth - I muffed up at the vendor and didn't notice until a week later), two empty glyph slots (minors, I think?), two unenchanted items, a green gem, no discernable 'theme' amongst gem slots, and I'm not sure her meta is active anymore. Also, I nuked her discipline offspec for shadow and she now does her shadowy DPS thing in her healing gear with 35% hit from Twisted Faith. None of this really worries me, though, because again - it's all getting replaced in a month. Her rag-tag outfit is the best I could put together on short notice, and it's what she solo-healed OS3D zergs in to get both Twilight Vanquisher and Nightfall titles the week after she hit 80. If we had more time before Cataclysm - say, two months or so - I'd go into Major Upgrades Needed mode. But now? Nah.

Gold check

Gers has a little over 600g. I'm okay with that. Originally I was trying to get her epic flight training before the expansion, but preparation for Itsie's pickup LK kill took precedence. I'm going to try and corner the market on level 45-65 crafting materials and fund the purchase that way.

Achievement check

I really wanted to get the Matron title for her, but Children's Week isn't for a while. But, like I said - Nightfall and Twilight Vanquisher. I'm happy. Also, since she got the Delicious Chocolate Cake recipe out of her first Shattrath cooking daily box, I might go for Chef again. (She'd be my second toon with the Chef title.)

Worgen, Worgen Everywhere

My husband and I are rolling worgen alts as soon as the servers come up. I've already amassed the heirloom gear (cloth, it's going to be a warlock) and some basic profession materials (lowbie herbs, for alchemy) on my bank mule. Since I went through all the banks of all my characters, I discovered that I already had the cloth shoulders, staff, and trinket! All I had to do was stockpile justice points on Itsie until I had the two-thousand-odd required to purchase the chestpiece.

So that's it for Turalyon. I spent my accumulated birthday money / tax return money / spare change on completely gutting and re-building my desktop computer, so transferring things off Tortheldrin will have to wait a while. I'm spending almost all my free time on Moon Guard enjoying the lowbie game on my XP-locked 36 prot warrior right now, so he'll be the focus of my next post.

Until then - to borrow a phrase from Stoneybaby - may all your hits be crits!

Interlude: Counting to 12

This is all I do in raids on Jabberwocky. Ten Rejuvs, one Lifebloom, one Wild Growth.

Repeat.

That's the entirety of my involvement in ten-man raids. Granted, what I listed above is one of my maximum-output routines and thus isn't the sort of thing you keep up over the course of an entire encounter, BUT STILL. If you can count to twelve, you can heal a raid. (In 25s, you probably just count to 12 twice. I don't know. I've never healed a 25 on my druid, which is the subject of another rant entirely.)

Raid healing as a post-4.0, pre-Cataclysm resto druid is not hard. Stacked hots on the entire raid mean nobody else has much to do but cover spikes, which brings me to the secondary topic of this post:

Pickup raid leaders, don't you DARE send me into the portals on Valithria Dreamwalker because I'm top on the healing meters. I have CRAP for single-target healing output, and I can solo-heal the raid better than anyone else in this group. Put the holy paladin, the holy priest, the resto shaman, the discipline priest in the portals. Because if I go in there, I guaran-damn-tee the encounter will take at least a third longer than it should.

Just because you looked at healing meters instead of considering why the numbers look that way.

How to Be Prepared (tm) for an expansion: Part 1

The overall look

Are you leveling a new character once December 7th rolls around? Take stock of your heirloom gear. Log through all of your alts - yes, ALL of them - and see what they've got. Mail it all to one central character (I use a bank mule for this) and then redistribute it as needed.

Take into account how often you actually play said alts, if you're ever going to level or twink them...and if need be, delete accordingly. I went from 50 characters (the account-wide cap) to 26. Every toon I tossed was under level 30 and a duplicate of something I already had above 70.

Take stock of your higher-level characters too! Will the Cataclysm recipes make maxing their professions easier? Then you don't need to worry about getting up to 450 before then - save your gold and use it on something else.

Do you know what toon you're leveling to 85 first? If not, or if you want to level several concurrently (hi, I'm an altoholic) make sure they have what they need to make the questing and instancing process as quick as possible. Stock repair money, convenient buff food, elixirs or flasks (hey, we get new ones anyway), and anything else you consider a necessity. In my case, it's pygmy oil by the stack and cooked deviate fish.

Got a bucket list? Double-check it and make sure you're satisfied with your progress.

How are you on gold? Do you have stockpiled crafting mats sitting around that you won't use up in the next three weeks? Sell some now, or hold onto them until after Cata and sell them when people leveling worgen and goblins start powerleveling professions.

Last and most important - how are you doing? Are you interested in playing until we get new content? If not, consider taking a couple weeks off. Volunteer at your local pet shelter and hug kittens or walk dogs. Learn the basics of a new language. Walk a mile every day (climate permitting). Or pick up blogging... :)

Alright, let's try this again.

Hello, internets!

WoW is in the lame-duck session between the last patch of Wrath (4.0.1) and the release of the Cataclysm expansion, and my classes are getting close to the end. I'm in my last semester of community college for my Associate's degree, then I'll be transferring to Local Big State University to finish up my Bachelor's. Woot!

In WoW news, I'm up to six level 80 characters.

SIX.

Wow.

I'm pulling the two on Tortheldrin off, because frankly Tortheldrin is a terrible server. The shaman is probably joining Jabberwocky on Sen'jin, and the druid will be going to Turalyon with Beshara (who is now Itsie, a gnome) and Gersemi (the priest who dinged her eightieth ding yesterday morning). My hunter remains all by his lonesome on Emerald Dream, for the sake of hanging out with old friends.

To Do Before Cataclysm:

-Kill Arthas on one character. Any character. It doesn't matter.

-Write up a Cata Prep! post for the two servers' worth of toons that...um...actually matter at this point.

-Do things in the Cata Prep! posts.

-Lament and mourn that finals week is the week *after* Cata drops, instead of the week *before*.

If we weren't facing an expansion, I'd have all sorts of stuff to write up. A resource post for total noob, newly-minted 80 healing priests. A how2deeps post for fury warriors. Another rant on healing meters, which seems to be the only way people reach this blog (but I'm changing that shortly, I hope). Actually, I might do the rant on healing meters anyway. It'll be good for my blood pressure.

Until next time!