So I was a little sick of tanking Mara Orange, so I decided to go play my mage. You know, the one I haven’t played in forever and can’t decide what spec to make her, and as my lowest level character, the top of the list for deleting in favor of a worgen when Cataclysm comes out. Though that really depends on the worgen female casting animations. The worgen male ones I’ve seen are pretty bleh, with them waving their arms around like they’re treading water or something.

So I logged on to my mage, tossed some points in frost, and queued for a random LFG. I got placed in Wailing Caverns, which made me think about how the alliance can now run Ragefire Chasm effortlessly by teleporting there via the LFG, I wonder how many people will level their characters with no concept that Ragefire Chasm is in Orgrimmar?

So this Wailing Caverns run was In Progress. And the existing party members were in combat. And not doing so well. The druid tank was dying, and yelling for heals on chat. The druid tank dies, the rogue dies shortly after, and when I catch up to where they are (west side, on the way to Cobrahn) the warrior is running towards me. I start frostbolt kiting the snake, and manage to kill it, but the warrior (queued as DPS, but protection-specced with a shield, if that makes any sense) dies from the other snake. The resto shaman is running away too, so I manage to finish off the other snake and leave the healer alive.

Healer rezzes everyone, and we continue up. Rogue says he’ll sap something and put up a skull when he’s ready. He saps something, the mob that he saps has a skull on it. Bear promptly says “whats sap” and runs in and breaks it. After we kill them, the rogue lays into the druid about how you should never break his sap, the druids can heal and we need all the CC we can get. I remark to the rogue that in most groups, skull = kill. He changes his macro to an X.

So we continue on, waiting patiently for the rogue to go in and sap things, with me thinking “I’m a mage… it’s a lot easier for me to just sheep things.” but the few times I try, people just go up and break it.

This whole time, the healer is yelling at us to loot the snakes so he can skin them. He just stands there over the dead mobs and calls out whoever needs to loot it. The rest of the group runs on to the next pull, I’m sitting there near the mobs, drinking, with every intention to loot it once I’m done drinking, and he’s like “MAGE! Loot the f***ing sneak!” and I’m like “God, chill for a second, I’m still drinking!” The warrior, who needs to loot the other snake, runs back to the shaman, /dances in his direction, then runs away without looting the snake. This continued for EVERY pull that had something skinnable in it.

In one pull, I notice the druid tank popping out of bear form, while something is attacking him, to cast Starfire on it.

Me: Umm, druid, you should probably stay in bear form while tanking. Popping out of form to cast Starfire doesn’t really help you at all.
Warrior: *runs off and pulls the next group of mobs*
Druid: *doesn’t move*
Me: *helps the warrior fight a snake, but pulls aggro with one frostbolt*
Snake: NOM! *reduces me to 10% HP*
Druid: *doesn’t move*
Rogue: *finally kills the mob that I was “tanking”*
Druid: ok
Me: God, who’s tanking this?
Druid: Me
Me: Yes, I know it SAYS you’re the tank.
Me: I nearly got eaten by that snake because nobody was tanking it.
Druid: u have to tell me these things
Druid: i cant see everything
Me: It was standing on top of you!
Me: You weren’t doing anything at all!

So we continued on some more.

We got to the place with the druids and shamblers… Rogue sapped one druid, and we pulled the shambler, when the bear ran in to kill the druid, the other druid nearby aggroed, so I sheeped it. It actually stayed unmolested for the rest of the fight, which was surprising for a while, until it was the only mob left and the druid ran on down the hallway.

Me: Hey druid!
Me: Come back!
Me: Where are you going? There’s one more mob left!
Me: What, are CCd mobs invisible now?
Druid: sorry, thought they were all dead
Conversation: *devolves into talking about how fail this group is*
Me: The only reason I haven’t left this group and put you all on my ignore list is that this is going to make a great failpug story for my blog later.
Warrior: whats the address for your blog? i wanna read it
Me: HELL no.

(Yes, I tend to talk a lot in instance groups)

Later on, the shaman died because a group of those little tiny lashers aggroed on him… we had to remind the druid to rez him, because he was the only one with a rez spell and he was already moving on to the next group, telling the rogue to sap something. I’m sure he would have followed that pull with a “HAELS” as he did every other time his health dipped below about half. Oh yeah, and I should probably also mention that his guild name was spelled in alternating caps and made some reference to ur mom.

Later on… (this one is a direct quote, as I still had it in my chat log afterwards)
Shaman: link DPS meee
Druid: *tells the rogue to sap something*
Shaman: link dps meter
Druid: *specifies to the rogue that he should sap “the chik”*
Me: I’d rather not.
Shaman: LINK DPS METER
Me: NO.
Shaman: why
Rogue: sapping
Me: Because if you care so much about dps when you’re the HEALER, maybe you should install the mod yourself.
Rogue: sapped
Rogue: gonna have to sheep the other one
Shaman: lol

After we killed Pythas, there was a pull with three druids, some shamblers and a ton of little lashers… the rogue stealthed over to sap one of the druids, but hit evasion instead of sprint, broke his own stealth, and rapidly got eaten by mobs. I managed to sheep one of them, but it wasn’t enough, the healer died in the chaos and I was dead soon after. “As amusing as this fail is, I don’t have time for this right now. Later!” Quit group.

But you know, karma. I was standing out near the graveyard when I left the group, so as I was not in an instance, I did not get teleported back to where I was before entering the instance. I was sitting there dead near the graveyard in the Barrens. It was at this point that I remembered that this mage was my bank/auction alt for quite some time, and as such, she had deleted her hearthstone ages ago.

So my level 19 mage is stranded here in Ratchet. With no hearthstone, no teleport spells, no flight points (she’s only ever been to Azuremyst and Bloodmyst) and not even a mount or Blink to let her run back to where she should be a little faster. I had been planning on putting everyone in that group on my ignore list (either for being a moron, being annoying, and/or for doing obscene things to corpses before rezzing them) and making a macro for my sheep so that it’ll mark the thing I’m sheeping with a symbol of some kind. Maybe at this point it would be easier to just delete this character like I was planning to do before.

There, now everything of value that she’s still stocking has been transferred to the guild bank. Mage… deleted.

Well, my warrior got up to the level where I’m being tossed into Orange Mara a ton, which infuriates me because of the two major bugs with the place. The first one being the level disparity, which not only throws level 40-41 players into a place with level 46 bosses, but also apparently causes the loot bags I get from running the place on random to be the lower-level ones instead. I got sent to a Mara Purple a couple days ago, and it gave me the iLevel 55 boots instead of the iLevel 45 shoulders. I’m convinced that the levels for Purple and Orange got switched, since the bosses (sorry, boss, there’s only one, as neither of the two earlier sides send you to kill Celebras and I’m pretty sure the third section starts you past the waterfall) in Purple are lower level.

The other bug, of course, being the stupid larva that respawns forever. I actually had a groupmate a couple runs ago who said it wasn’t a bug, it just respawns infinitely. As it is my JOB to find bugs in video games, I took this personally and took a moment to explain it to him. It is a BUG because you can attack the tube they come out of just like you used to, and kill said tube, just as you used to, but as soon as it dies it kinda… dies in reverse, and spits out a new larva. If this were working as intended, then either you could kill it and it would stay dead, or you wouldn’t be able to attack it in the first place.

Though the random dungeon finder did send me to Zul’Farrak yesterday. And something awesome happened. We were on the stairs, doing the event, and we were waiting for the mobs to come up the stairs. And the boomkin just kinda… ran up and Hurricaned all the mobs at the bottom. I thought to myself “HOLY CRAP” and ran over, thunderclapping and hitting my AoE taunt and shield wall and it was GLORIOUS. I said in party chat when it was over “WOW I always wanted to do that but never had the nerve to try!” and the boomkin was all “happy to help!” I wandered around the bottom cleaning up the last few when a big huge group of mobs respawned and aggroed on me. Again, it was GLORIOUS.

But speaking of bugs, I checked out Allods Online due to all of the people talking about it lately. I find myself somewhat confused by a number of parts of it.

When I first started it up, the character selection screen confused me. It had like, classes on one side, and equivalent classes on the other side as the other faction, as part of the background artwork that had been displaying to me during loading. It would give me a short description of what types of things each class could do, and which races could play those classes.

But it didn’t mark out which of those races was being displayed here (I don’t see why they have to give the humans of either side such weird race names) so I discovered that my character’s looks are very important to me. When starting a brand new game that I barely know anything about, race is most important, followed by class and then faction. Don’t ask me to pick my faction first. I don’t have any idea what that means!

How do I pick a class that can be one of two races if I don’t know what either of those races looks like? I mean, it says that Kanians and Elves can be paladins, but what race is that girl in the top corner with the fairy wings? I eventually discovered that “Elves” means magical fairy-winged people that hover slightly off the ground (rather than foresty-sneaky-people with long ears), and “Kanians” means good-aligned humans. Of the other faction, the Xana-whatevers are the evil-aligned humans, orcs look rather more like the Warhammer orcs if anything, and the Arisen I assume are supposed to be some kind of undead, but they look more like the jedi-droids from star wars. I’m not sure what’s going on with them… it’s not giving me any kind of backstory for any of these races. Just saying “here! Pick one!”

So I ended up going with an elven paladin (named Kareja like my draenei paladin in WoW, it has more personal meaning to it ever since I discovered it was also the name of a major character in Shelters of Stone, and Jean M Auel picked the name for the same reason I did) and jumped off into the starting area.

The first thing I notice is that this game needs a better localization team. Which doesn’t surprise me, really. My time in QA has taught me that even the testers who are hired for their knowledge of English rarely catch run-on sentences and other more complicated issues. My god, that first quest dialogue could probably have used at least another half-dozen commas. The voiceovers for the story parts were kinda neat, though jarring when the VO didn’t match the text that was displayed in the chat log at the same time.

I learned a few attacks automatically when going through the starting area, attempting to read them between combats. First of all, I apparently have to manually hit my basic attack, it uses a global cooldown. It took me a while of wondering why I was killing things so slowly until I figured out that my character wasn’t attacking unless I specifically told her to. I have a second attack that puts a “Mark of the Pariah” on my target. I can’t figure out what the hell that does, if anything. It doesn’t seem to have any effect other than being a type of combo point for my third attack, which “detonates” my Marks of the Pariah to deal damage, give me energy, and slow the target for a certain duration.

Because oh yeah, my paladin is apparently a rogue. Combo points? Check. Finishing move that deals more damage based on how many combo points I’ve accumulated? Check. Energy as a resource type? Check. I don’t know if this is specific to the paladin, or if all classes use this same mechanic. I haven’t tried out the other classes yet, though I assume the others use mana, since I found some spring water that apparently restores mana.

I haven’t learned any heals yet, but I see some in my talent panel. There’s one that heals a certain amount, and costs two “Canons” and another that I can use outside of combat that restores ten “Canons”. I have no idea what these Canons are, and the game doesn’t really see fit to enlighten me. Are they some kind of healing surges or something?

Also, I find the lack of a mini map slightly disturbing. All I get is this little arrow in the corner where the map is supposed to be, and it tells me which way is north. That isn’t really helpful for navigation.

I just have to wonder. Why “Allods”? I mean, I understand its connection to the storyline, as “Allods” are apparently the void islands that float in the Astral Sea. But why did they pick that particular nonsense word? It doesn’t really have a nice ring to it. It doesn’t make me want to find out more about the game. It just makes me go “that’s a really weird name” and possibly avoid the game because of its strange name. Kinda like that french browser MMO named Dofus. Maybe Allods meant something to the Russians. I figure they would have picked a better name for their American release.

More localization stuff, I’ve been picking up random greens that are named “Noun Adjective of the Noun” which probably makes sense in Russian, but in English just leads to “Slippers Damaged of the Wizard” and “Jacket Battered of the Bloodletter”. Those are two items in my bags right now. I completely understand that placement of text variables makes fixing this a non-trivial task, but surely they could have done SOMETHING about it.

Though I do like how it highlights the stats that are good for my class and even tells me so in my character panel, saying “This stat is very useful for your class” in green on the tooltip, and highlighting the good stats on items, as well, so I can just compare the parts in green and kinda ignore the rest. It does make it a lot easier to learn a new class if the game outright tells me “these are the stats you want” right on the items. Though I have yet to figure out how much each one is comparatively worth, that comes with time.

Edit: Oh yeah, one other thing I forgot to mention. What’s with the decimal numbers on my attacks? Why does my secondary attack deal 6.8 to 11.4 damage? I’ve never actually seen myself deal decimal amounts of damage, so why doesn’t it just say “7 to 11″? Why do they have to make it complicated like that?

So I’m gonna share with you a revelation I had about tanking last night. It’s just like DPS, except instead of trying your best to hold back so that you don’t pull aggro, you actually WANT to pull aggro from everybody!

I tried combining Thunder Clap with Cleave, but a shift-modifier on a number key is difficult enough to reach that it was more annoying than anything. I’m going to have to find a different button for my Shield Slam when I get to 40. (Which is less than four levels away, I’m really getting a lot of XP from running so many of these things.)

Honestly, I did four more runs last night. In every single one of them, I was on the top of the damage meters. Sometimes by a considerable margin, like that one time I had 38% of the group’s damage and the next highest person had 22%.

I seem to actually be developing a tanking pet-peeve: people who link damage meters in the middle of a run for no reason. I will usually respond something like “Did we ask for damage meters? Thanks for the spam.” and I put the last guy who was like “No but you didn’t NOT ask for them either” on ignore.

In my opinion, if you care about damage meters, run them yourself. When I play my DPS characters, I take pride in being on top of the meters, but that doesn’t mean I go waving my e-peen around at the end of the run going “hey look at me guys, I beat all of you into the dust!” Why should they care? I’m just going to sit here and be smug at my own awesome. No need to share. Unless someone is interested, and actually asks for someone to post them.

And I am apparently an incredibly capable tank. I actually had a healer last night complaining that it was a snore-fest, she barely had to heal me, I’m like “maybe I should pull more!” and pulled two groups at once… and she was like “no, still a snore-fest, you just don’t take enough damage!” and then we started joking about how I should start removing pieces of armor or try tanking with a two-hander.

I won the Carapace of Tuten-kash from RFD (which makes 3 extremely nice plate items waiting for me at 40), and got two extremely nice rings from the random prize packs, one of them with defense on it! I’m really looking forward to when I start to get matched with Cathedral, so I can start trying for that awesome red shield.

Edit: Oh right, I completely forgot something else I was gonna mention. In the last RFD run, one of the people in the group wanted to go down the shortcut path to hit the last two bosses, and skip all the other ones. Instead of following meekly behind and sighing “well, at least it will be over soon so I can get a group for the rest of it” I put my foot down and said “I rather enjoy running the whole instance. If you want to do a quick run, you can find a new tank” and was close to just quitting group and reading blogs for 15 minutes before coming back to a new dungeon.

Luckily, the rest of the group sided with me at that point, and the healer left. We found a new healer in less than 30 seconds (did I mention this was around 2:30 AM the night before Christmas Eve?), the one who was calling the place a snore-fest above. The thing is, I would never have spoken up on my healers or DPS. Being the tank, I have the power to set the pace of the group. It’s not about “hey guys, can we go clear out that room over there so I can finish this quest?” it’s more like I just go over and do it, and the group has to follow me. Muahahaha. Tanking is quite the power trip.

I saw Avatar yesterday in 3D. I found it to be the best movie I’ve ever seen, and an almost religious experience. Firstly for its realism — and I’m not talking graphics. I mean the attention to detail put in to every little bit, from the ship they took to get there looking like a natural progression from our modern satellites, to actually having a reasonable scientific explanation for the natural link on the planet. Secondly is the ability to somehow combine everything awesome into one movie, from an alien world far from Earth, bioluminescent jungles, giant mechs with machine guns. A fight for survival, a reminder of how sterile this world is, and how I really wish I could live. I’m sure I’m not the only one.

I understand now why Bones had an episode that revolved around standing in line for the movie, because one of Dr. Brennan’s grad students was one of the main characters in it. I was really psyched that he was in it, because I tend to feel closer to TV actors I see on a weekly basis than movie actors I might see once a year at best. Like the scientist lady in the movie. She looked… familiar somehow. I looked it up on IMDB and felt ashamed that she turned out to be Sigourney Weaver. That name sounds familiar to me. Like I should automatically know who that person is. But reading through her appearances, the main thing she’s done that I’d be familiar with would be Galaxy Quest, ‘cuz I’ve totally seen that movie two dozen times by now and I’m still not sick of it. And we watched Wrath of Khan today and it totally had Kirstie Alley in it, and I was thinking to myself “she’s totally famous now!” but couldn’t for the life of me figure out what she was in.

I feel really sad that Khoa’s eyes do not agree with the 3D technology and almost the entire movie was blurry for him, leaving him with a massive headache afterwards. My head was mostly fine afterwards, though my ears hurt like hell due to how the glasses pressed against them for 3 hours. I was extremely tired because of the crowds at the mall when I returned most of my Christmas presents (and ended up with almost $100 in store credit at some random place I’ve never heard of before) and ended up actually getting to sleep at a reasonable time last night.

Anyway. Since my last post, my warrior has made it up to level 41. I have removed Heroic Strike from my bars entirely, swapped my Glyph of Revenge for a Glyph of Cleave, macroed Cleave into Revenge (my main bar from ~ to 4 are now are now Shield Block – Shield Slam – Thunder Clap – Revenge/Cleave – Sunder Armor, with the last almost never used), and have been busy learning the proper uses of Shield Slam and Vigilance. Being top DPS in each group is now the norm instead of being something strange. I have been as much as 48% of the damage of a group, and only rarely does a mage or warlock surpass me by casting Blizzard/Rain of Fire nonstop and drinking between every pull.

And yet, I take so little damage that the DPS are the only people who ever need to drink. Unless of course, I go out of my way to PULL MOAR by shooting one mob with my crossbow and taunting a second while running into a third. I have become quite adept at pulling using Taunt, usually grabbing two or three groups at a time, though it can be hard when there are casters involved. Line of sight is being learned at this point. DPS who do not understand why I am running around the corner are annoying.

I have stopped running random dungeons and now only queue for Uldaman, as I will do until my damn gloves drop. I am quickly learning an optimal pulling strategy here. Pull the southern passage, then the northern one, to be nice to anyone who happens to need the dead paladin. Kill Revelosh before picking up the second piece of the staff, so that we know who needs to pick it up (the shaft is randomly lootable by one member of the party, while anyone can open the chest by the dwarves, but the two items cannot be traded between party members for some reason that is probably extremely low-priority on Blizzard’s fix list) I can pull multiple basilisks/bats while fighting scorpions. Pull the caster dwarves around the corner using line of sight (and be annoyed at the random DPS who run ahead of me and attack them before they can get there, turning the whole thing into a huge mess).

So my last RFD run, I zone in to see that my healer is a druid named “Gayheals”.

Another member of the group is a night elf hunter named “Legolaselfi” who is never once seen using his bow, has his talent points spread out amongst the three trees (with the largest number of points in Marksmanship, why he had so many ranged talents when he never used his bow, I will never understand) and who rolls Need on the PLATE chestpiece from the spider boss.

Not like I care, I already have one, but it’s the principle of the thing. His melee DPS actually wasn’t THAT far behind the other hunter in the group. But when we’re like “dude, why did you roll need on that? You can’t even equip it!” and his response is “it isn’t for me, it’s for someone else” I don’t really hesitate to kick him.

As far as that healer goes, I waited until we were done with the place before putting him on my ignore list and reporting his name to the GMs.