Aerie Peak is a highly populated pve server and Jools' new guild has a lot of members. SW was more crowded than I have ever seen it.
I was pretty nervous when I logged in for the first time here, and whispered the recruiting officer of the guild for an invite.
Was a bit like going to a new job for the first time, you are really careful not to make an ass of yourself, like laughing at the wrong things, saying the wrong things or generally put your foot in it.
Well, I was invited and heartily welcomed by them all :-)
Some guildies wanted to do a heroic and I offered my services as a healer (trepidatingly, cause I did not want to mess things up and lose ppl due to sucky healing on my very first day here, but I figured I might as well jump into the boiling pot as soon as possible, so to speak ;P)
I got extra nervous when I discovered that all my addons had been resetted during the transfer, and all my customized help-for-a-confused-healer was gone. Hurriedly I tried to set them up from memory, and I got the basic parts covered.
Anyways, off to the Ramparts we went, me, a bear tank and three hunters. I needn't have worried, the run went smooth and fast and it was a lot of fun. I didn't lose anybody, which was more luck than skill on my part though cause there were some real close calls when I misclicked or was just plain absentminded.
Well, I did die myself once, due to my own stupidity... *slaps head* Psychic Scream, dummy, use that when the mobs are beating on you, Fade is on cd and the bear's Growl is resisted! (Well, use it in situations like this at least, when there's no risk that the feared mobs will draw new ones to you.)
All in all, it was not a bad first-night-in-the-guild for me. To paraphrase an aviator's saying, "any landing that you can walk away from is a good landing", and I think I was able to walk from this one pretty good.
So, hello my new guildes, it was good to meet you and I am looking forward to getting to know you all :-)
Type rest of the post here
Monday, June 16, 2008
...where many have gone before
To boldly go...
This day Jools moved to the Aerie Peak realm.
She spent the last weekends' mornings doing some heroics with some of her friends on Vashj, getting her Exalted with the Sha'tar, concluding with a quiet come-together around a bonfire in Elwynn Forest before she packed her bags and transferred. 
Aerie Peak is a pve realm = no more being ganked while peacefully questing!
Jools has found a new cool guild there and although all her sisters are on Vashj I think she will like it a lot in her new home. 
It's not likely that she ever will forget the fun times she had on Vashj, and if she comes even remotely close she can always watch this video made for her by one of her dearest friends! (And yes, I cried a lot of happy tears when I watched it :-)
So, this is a goodbye from Jools to everyone she knew on Vashj. May you all live long and prosper, may your days be sunny and warm, and may you all be careful what you wish for, because you might get it!
Sunday, June 15, 2008
Turpster's Dingstravaganza
The day was bright and clear on Sporeggar (EU) as the gnomes and dwarves started gathering in Dun Morogh to join in that once-in-a-lifetime-event-Turpster-Dingstravaganza, the killing of the Turpster (lvl 69 undead Priest) by the armies of the Turpies!
Some were more prepared than others...
And looking stylish is no excuse for not gearing up!
Some were trying to deter us from our goal by a pitiful attempt at annihilating us before we got started...
But we laughed at them and gathered up outside the cave of the Turpster, forming an orderly line...
Some were taking the opportunity to try and score more than a boss kill though ;P
And even as we waited we had to clear some trash respawns...
... and the gnome ghost train was running back to the cave.
When the event started we were 175 members in the guild the Turpies, none of us above lvl 6, + an assorted bunch of trial account raiders who could not be invited to the guild. We were easily more than 200 people waiting to assault the Turpster.
Time to go! We ran into the lair of the Turpster!
NOT a good idea to press CTRL-V!
I had my healbot configured to my two healing spells, Lesser Heal (Rank 2) and Lesser Heal (Rank 1).
Under the massive onslaught of the Turpies the Turpster was going down!
After this unique world first kill (SK Gaming eat our shorts! ;P) we all headed to IF to watch the Big T ding 70.
Some confusion arose as to where the actual ding would take place, and sadly I got to the SW tram station only in time to see the newly dinged Turpster hearthstone away :-(
Gratz to the Turpies for downing this imba boss, and gratz Turpster to your 70-ding!
It was a great event, and I would not have missed it for the world!
For more pictures (including one of the actual ding) visit Yet Another Warlock Nerf, or for a video of the event itself check out the Dingstravaganza at YouTube.
Friday, June 13, 2008
Dingstravaganza - beta test
This here is Tessytoots, prepping for the Turpster Dingstravaganza on Saturday night. Prepping is easy in this case, all she has to do is ding lvl 6 and be ready for the appearance of the Big T.
I created Tessytoots and logged in on Sporeggar Friday afternoon, and to my delight I found out that there was a beta test coming up!
The Turpster showed up, dressed in rags, and the valiant members of the guild the Turpies immediately set upon him!
We gathered in numbers and the big ugly was soon overwhelmed by our determination and skillful attacks on him!
He was going dooown!
But the cunning one had a few more trick up his sleeve! He summoned an add! And ouch, Holy Nova hurts!
But in the end, the Turpies emerged victoriously!
The Big T showed up for a few more tests, and the main event is to take place tonight, Saturday June 14th, after the LIVE WoW Insider Show (3:30pm EST/8:30pm GMT), at around 4:45pm EST/9:45pm GMT.
When I logged out last night, Tessytoots being lvl 5,5, the Turpies had 70 members, none of them above lvl 6. I have no doubt that the Turpster will go down bigtime tomorrow and it will be a spectacular event!
Be there!
Thursday, June 5, 2008
20 k Curse of Doom!
So last night I was in Karazhan again. Was a fun run, we started at The Curator and worked our way up to the Prince with only a few minor glitches.
The Curator dropped a token for the imba warlock gloves, but I passed on them since I was wearing my own imba gloves, complete with sparkling stuff and a nice enchant, while my fellow warlock in there only had some blue crap on.
Anyways after the big ugly mofo was down my newly be-gloved fellow meddler in the dark arts asked me about Curse of Doom crits during the mofo's Evocation.
Well, truthfully, I am usually to busy to check how much damage I do while in the middle of a fight, but after everything has settled down I am likely to head over to WoW Webstats and take a peek at my performance and see what things I can work on to improve my damage output, especially since I recently went Destro and am still trying to work out how to handle this fiery spec :-)
So I headed off there and looked. Idd, the Curse of Doom does some very serious spike damage when it goes off!
20 902 damage!! Too bad it is on a 1-minute timer, eh? ;P
Wednesday, June 4, 2008
Yay! Finally
After having commited full-scale war on the Furbolgs and Giants in Winterspring, I finally got my sweet pink-ish tiger! (Ok, its more lavender than pink, but still...)
It was one happy gnome that went riding around Shattrah that night :-)
The grind to Exalted with the Wintersabre Trainers was a long one, but not that painful. The worst part was waiting for the mobs to respawn, since they are the quest mobs for another q as well.
I had company a lot of the time too, a paladin friend (Crusader Aura ftw!), and a sweet mage I met there who also wanted that cute tiger.
So, now its lvling time for Dizzie!
Thursday, May 29, 2008
Lost friends and found friends
Yesterday was a sad day.
One of my best friends in the guild had decided to leave us and join another guild. I was very unhappy to see him go and I will miss him a lot, but I understand his reasons for wanting to leave and I can’t say that they are wrong.
I know we will keep playing together, heroics and bg’s and dailies and hopefully even some pug raids, so its not like it was goodbye for ever, but still… And now my friends list is about twice as long as usual, after I put all his chars on it ;P
Yesterday also brought a shocking revelation!
Last year, this guy I played with rather much got fed up with the game and everything and decided to go out in flames, which he did rather dramatic and eloquently, I must say. With the hindsight that comes when you have seen both sides of the fence, so to say, I can understand his reasons for not being happy and they were not all unfounded, but he was a bit on the black-list for a while there.
He popped up a few times after that but presently he ceased showing up. I assumed he had transferred servers or quit playing, and eventually I forgot about him.
Last night, another WoW-friend of mine whom I met a few months ago and play a lot with from time to time nowadays told me he had a confession to make. He told me he knew me, that we had been playing together a lot before, and then he told me he actually was the very same guy I mentioned above, the one who blew up and (I thought) quit the game!
I was like hahahahahaha omfg are you serious? It’s you? It’s really you?
Curiously enough, I was not angry or upset or anything like that, I was just hilariously wtf-ed and had a lot of questions. Where did this char come from? Did you lvl him from scratch? Where is your other char, the one you played before? And what I found most amazing was: How could you keep this a secret these past months when we have played together?
Writing this, I still feel like I am about to bubble over with incredulity and zomg-ness, but what I feel most is actually genuine happiness that he’s back :-)
I promised him not to mention any names in my blog and I won’t tell anyone who he is, but it will certainly require some serious wilful restraining on my part, cause what I really want to do is stand on the rooftops and shout to everyone I know that he’s back.
Kara - for gear or badges?
I am sometimes told I have a low heal bonus. Well, it’s really not that much to brag about, only a little over 1500 or so, which compared to the many +2k healers in my guild is pretty low. I do my best to increase it though, I run heroics for loot and badges, I do bg’s to get some of the good pvp healing gear, I do the dailies for gold and rep to get me some of the sweet rep rewards.
I have a wish list of Karazhan drops that would be nice upgrades for my healing outfit:
Red Riding Hood's Cloak
Blue Diamond Witch-Wand
Ribbon of Sacrifice
Masquerade Gown
Hnadwraps of the Incarnate
Pauldrons of the Solace-Giver
All of the above may drop in the first parts of Karazhan up to the Curator. The bosses of the upper part of Kara also has a lot of nice drops but usually we don't go further than the Curator in one go.
So last night I signed up for the scheduled Karazhan run, hoping for a chance to snag some of the nice healing drops in there, and get a few more badges so I can buy my very first piece of shiny stuff from that greedy smith Hauthaa.
However, I did not get invited to the run :-(
Well, that’s ok, there were a lot of people that had signed up and wanted to go, I do not expect to get to raid every time I feel like it.
But then I take a look at who is going, and I see three healers that are fully decked out in high-level epics, all badge geared and with heal bonuses way over 2 k. None of them need even a single drop from Kara and if anything of the above dropped it would probably be disenchanted or go to some hybrid class’s offspec.
Naturally I felt a little disappointed, thinking that why the heck do these people go for Kara runs when there are other players out there who would seem to benefit more from it, but I guess the guild management had done some planning and in their infinite wisdom come to the conclusion that for this run it was actually better to bring healers who didn’t need any drops and let the less-geared who could benefit from drops sit it out.
Anyways, with my usual luck regarding drops and rolls, probably none of the things on my wish list would have dropped for me had I been in there.
And if I don’t get into the guild Kara badge farm runs I can always go pugging since it seems that is allowed now, hoping for some better luck in drops there :-)
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Pug Runs?
You know what a pug is, right? Pick-up-group, a group consisting of people not all from the same guild or circle of friends, a group of people most of whom you don’t know.
Pugging 5-mans happens all the time, but raid pugging is a little more delicate. Most serious guilds don’t allow their members to go pugging raids, since that means those guildies won’t be available for guild raids to that particular raid instance that week or until it resets.
A guildie of mine went pugging a Gruul’s Lair run the other day. No big deal, I would say, it’s not like my guild has done any 25-man raids for weeks, and no raid to the Lair is on the GroupCalendar for the upcoming week. It was reset the day after anyways, so even if any spontaneous Gruul runs should arise my guildie would be able to join.
What might make this a little delicate though is that apparently pugging raids have been a definite no-no, even grounds enough for a gkick, and this was an officer who was doing the pugging. I do not know if the rules have been changed recently, but its a sure-fire way to stir up guild drama by having different rules for members and officers.
My opinion only, but I think that the title of officer is associated with certain obligations as well as privileges. If you call yourself a raiding guild, the grunts of the guild expects the officers to arrange raids.
If you pug raids as an officer, you risk signalling to the rest of the guild that you are unable or unwilling to arrange these raids for the guild, because obviously you want to go there since you did, but you are not wanting it enough to make it happen for the guild, or even worse, that you really just care about the chance to get phat lewt, but you carry the guild tag with you wherever you go.
In this case, I am sure nothing of the above was intended, it was just a chance to have fun in the middle of the night after a bad guild progress run in another raid instance. Still, it sends out the wrong signals, and I think it was a rather bad call.
Last year, in the summer of 2007, we had barely started doing Karazhan on our own and had trouble getting enough people online at the same time to make the raids happen. A trial member in our guild arranged some pug runs to Kara with some of his friends from other guilds and invited some of the guild members who went along with it. I was asked to come, and hesitantly agreed, but after they found out my druid was feral and not resto I was not wanted anymore.
Just as good, actually, because at that time I was an officer in the guild and it would have felt wrong to go on pug runs in Kara when not all of our members who wanted to go were welcome. It would have felt disloyal to my guild, I was an officer and expected to make raids happen within the guild, not go outside it for raiding.
Normal members have more freedom in that aspect, but if the people in charge of the guild go off doing raids in pugs, I can't help but feel a little let down by them. I don’t want the privileges and responsibilities of being a guild officer, that’s why I left that post, but if you want it I think you’d better be prepared that its not all raindrops and roses and whiskers on kittens, its a good deal of hard work and drudgery in there too.
But ah well, I don't make the rules and I don't enforce them, I keep my opinions to myself mostly since I don't want to get involved (except I write them here to get any lingering feelings of ill-ease off my chest), and I smile and move along :-)
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Sad sad sad
There was this kid that joined our guild recently. Well, he gave his age to be 18 on his application but he felt rather young and immature in his words and actions.
On his first Kara run with us he was all Ooo I hope this and that drops and I want this and generally blubbering away like a child, giving the impression of being very young. But we have a few more members like this, and while it gets really old after about 15 seconds or so its usually bearable, nothing to get too upset about.
The next day he managed to severely piss off some of my friends by filling gchat with a lot of annoying bullshit to the extent that they wanted one of the officers to gkick him. As I was in group with them at the time, the officer asked my opinion too, and I gave it. Had just come online, didn’t know what had been said, and maybe the kid somehow didn’t realise that he was being so offensive, perhaps a small chat officer-to-trial-member would be appropriate. Let’s be the mature ones here and give him a chance to mend his ways, so to speak.
Another day goes by, I am doing some AV’s with my warlock to prep for that upcoming nice Merciless Gladiator gear, when I see the same kid proudly stating in gchat that he always picks on any emos he meets. Eh, say again? Why? Seems his gf was once picked on by an emo and thus it was legitimate to treat all emos badly after that. Also seems there was an emo in his class once, but some headslamming made that one see the error of his ways.
Also, emos was bad for people around them, they dragged people down and mentally hurt them, so it was ok to pick on them and headslam them, thus hurting them both physically and mentally.
Gay people got a swing of the same hammer, seems you become gay by spending time with gay people, which was a really bad thing.
All these statements and then some were delivered as Absolute Truths, not opinions. And not one time, even, oh no, he was repeating himself, hammering home the points, making us all absolutely unable to harbour any hopes that maybe he was just really really bad at expressing himself instead of really really bad at being a kind and decent human being.
Somehow along the way he involved God and the church too. We should all be lucky the church had been there for us all this time, otherwise we’d all be speaking Turkish and living in a Moslem empire. The slaughtering of people in religious wars over gold and power was justified because it served a higher purpose. Even today, the church was sorely needed to keep people in line.
I told him he came across as a small-minded nasty vicious idiot, which was my opinion. Small-minded because he couldn’t accept that anyone had views and tastes and beliefs that he didn’t approve of, nasty and vicious because he advocated violence, mental and physical, against anyone with a lifestyle that he didn’t approve of, and idiot because he didn’t hesitate to spew this filth among people he had just met and was (I guess) trying to make a good impression on to let him stay and get phat lewtz.
Anyways, after an hour or so of him throwing out more and more filth in ghcat, and not being able to understand that me and everyone else was not agreeing with him and not being able to even concede that I or anyone else might not be totally wrong, I told him I considered him a lost cause and would put him on ignore so I would not have to risk feeling sickened from reading his vile so-called “facts” littering up gchat.
It was really saddening.
Most saddening of all was that this was a kid. Few kids are rational, they are too caught up in the whirlwind of hormones and fear of not fitting in and the general angst of growing up and finding your place in the world, all this in this case reinforced by the Greater Internet Dickwad Theory. I should not have argued with him like I did. He was disgusting and vicious and nasty, but still a kid.
Will he grow up like that, believing he has the answer to everything, that it is ok to hurt and ridicule people that don’t think or look like him? Will he ever find out that it is a person’s actions towards others that are important, not what said person look like or think like or what kind of music she listens to, or will he keep spreading the intolerance and ignorance he so painfully obviously displayed in gchat? Will he ever realise that it is ok to be different and help people instead of being afraid of them?
I hope he will turn out ok. He had some fun things going, like the Murloc song he sang in gchat, so there must be a streak of light in him.
And how much of this is our responsibility anyways? WoW is a game, I play it for fun, not to raise other people’s kids. When I see someone saying things I find unacceptable, I speak up, but if they don’t shape up or at least agree to not agree with me, carefully walking the line, I put them on ignore. I don’t log in to get pissed off or saddened by some little twat’s abysmal ignorance and intolerance. But do we have an obligation to try and help people see the light, so to speak, when they so obviously are floundering around in the darkness?
In a perfect world, I would say yes, we have a responsibility and an obligation to help and support people we encounter. Even in our less-than-perfect world I like to think that we will help each other out. But this... I don’t want to spend my time in WoW trying to foster a generous spirit in some anonymous jerk. Am I selfish? Probably.
He got gkicked later that night. I wonder if he will truly realise why, and if he will grow from the experience and be a better person, or if he will just blame me and think it’s a conspiracy of gay emos out to get him.
I hope for the former, but I fear it’s the latter.
