Listening to raid instructions

There is a running joke in the guild that Jess' raid instructions are like lectures and the rest of us are students. In keeping with the analogy, folks ask for Cliff Notes sometimes and the joke is that Vel and I are sometimes caught "passing notes in class" and not completely paying attention:

Jess: Ok, Vel?
Vel: Huh? Sorry, I was whispering K.

On a little more serious note though, I think its important for us healers to listen to all of the raid instructions and adapt our healing strategy based on that. Now I'm not talking about knowing what the boss or encounter is going to do, but knowing what your specific raid leader is instructing your raid to do.

I guess listening to what the tanks are instructed to do is a bit more obvious, such as preparing for a switch in tanking by throwing out hots to the second tank. But listening to what the dps is instructed to do is important as well. Knowing where folks were going to be and which dps was assigned specific duties ensures that healers keep them within line of sight and can perhaps pay special attention to someone who has a critical role.

Does this mean Vel and I will promise to hang onto Jess' every word? Hmmm... we'll see.

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Did you ever know you were yourself?

One of my favorite things to do on the weekend mornings to get up, make some great yummy coffee, and log in to do some relaxing herbing. As my guildies have heard me say, herbing + coffee = love.

However, this weekend, I had more than just herbing and coffee. I had a little humor too. Hopefully BRK (yes that BRK) will not mind me posting this, but it was just too funny! Apparently BRK owes his readers something? An explanation or something?

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WOW with bubblegum and cotton candy

Have any of you heard of a MMORPG called Nostale? O....M....F....G.... just check out some of the images from this game:

From a website called Cute MMORPGS, Nostale has some similarities with WOW:

"Nostale centers around conquering a series of instanced dungeons. The design of the dungeons emphasize player comradery, and beating a time-limit. As you advance, it becomes almost impossible to play these dungeons solo. And because clearing dungeons is also an integral part of the game’s story, it’s essential to make friends and work with other people.

Another fun part of Nostale is building your house and showing it off. As one advances and accumulates more wealth, the player can purchase and place items in your housing area."

They have player housing! One thing I wish WOW would have! Nostale even includes a pvp component (how could I even kill one of these too cute toons?!?!). Anyways Nostale has its own wikipedia page. This looks like the different classes you can have:

Can you even imagine? I can't quite decide if I think its incredibly cute or whether or not it'd be too much bubblegum and cotton candy for me.

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Ignis and Kologarn down - No room for slackers!

Hope everyone had a good long weekend. As for the Claw, we had two new kills in Ulduar, Ignis and Kologarn. We actually got down Kologarn first:

Next was Ignis, which we finally got down! And can I just say that I <3 Rejuv + Swiftmend glyph + Swiftmend to deal with the crotch pocket?

I think Ignis sort of became our Shade of sorts. While we had gotten to the point over the last week or so where Razorscale and XT-002 were easily kills, Ignis was still giving us trouble. It gave us so much trouble that Kalthan refused to die on the ground:

It was definitely gratifying to get down two bosses who we had trouble with just the week before, but almost strange to see them go so smoothly. I think I held my breath for most of the Ignis fight! And yes, there was a lot of discussion over whether Ignis was a tank fight or healer fight or dps in charge of the constructs gone wild (DVD to come out shortly) fight.

Now compared to Naxx runs, I think that there is no room for slackers in Ulduar. Naxx was easy enough that you could have a person not completely pull their weight or not know a fight or move out of the way of something. Others could pick up the slack. But there is certainly no room for that in Ulduar!

I felt that our Kologarn and Ignis kills required all 10 of us to really be at the top of our game, kicking ass individually and together. One person screws up, its a wipe... which is why I think both kills were achieved with all 10 folks up at the end. It did sorta put the pressure on everyone though, knowing how important they were. But the fact that you are running with 9 other folks who not only kickass and really know how to play, but are also damn funny and who you truly enjoy running with, and it all adds up to a pretty damn good time (what's up with all the damns, right?) Iron Council, we iz coming for yous!

Finally, I haven't talked about drops for a while, but I just had to mention this. I have finally upgraded my weapon! I got Plasma Foil off XT-002. Wanna know what it replaced? War Mace of Unrequited Love. Yes friends, I've had a mace from heroic Nexus this whole entire time. /embarassment

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The many sides of K

Some cute random screenshots because well, they are cute... and well, I am random.

Here I am sitting like a lady at the Argent Tournament. I love how my hands are so nicely folded in my lap.

Here is the total opposite of the pic above, K being a total badass by driving a chopper for Flame Leviathan. She is yelling at everyone to get out of her freakin way.

The real K? Well probably a little bit of both proper and badass. Finally, Jess and I stopped bickering long enough to peacefully fish side by side. Funny part is that while we agreed enough to be fishing, we are fishing on totally opposite sides and casting our lines across each other!

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Better with drinks?

Anyone else think that their raids are a little more successful with drinks? I think some of our guildies perform best after just one or two drinks, where some folks seem to perform better with even more than just one or two drinks (you know who you are!). Personally, I am not a big drinker, but I would say on average our guild raids seem to do best when folks are just a bit more relaxed after that first drink or two.

On a more serious note, I'm curious what people think about the relation between gear and skill in success. I've seen first hand skill outperforming gear, but how far can skill get you? Would skill play into 60% of success and gear 40%? 55% and 45%? 70% and 30%?

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Why isn't it ever a "tank fight"?

During one of our last Ulduar runs, this tree had a revelation. I can't remember exactly which boss we were working on, but a comment was made to the effect of "this is a healer fight". I paused for a second, held up a branchy arm, and posed my question over vent, the gist of which is:

Why is it that you hear from time to time the phrase "its a dps check" or "its a healer fight" but you rarely or hardly ever hear "its a tank fight"? Was it a tank that came up with these two phrases so that tanks aren't ever "blamed" for a wipe? If dps and healers can be blamed, I think its only fair, don't you? Amirite or Amirite?

Everyone laughed and agreed. There was more laughter on a subsequent night when we wiped on some boss and I declared, "Sigh, this is so obviously a tank fight". I definitely recognize when certain fights are dps checks and others are very much reliant on the healers. I wouldn't have a problem with that if certain fights placed the crux of the responsibility on the tanks. Or is it that there really is no such thing as a "tank fight"?

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Where K gets pwned by Blizz

After a lot of going back and forth about whether I was really going to go to Blizzcon, I finally decided to do so. But then what happens? I totally got pwned by Blizzard! I was not able to get tickets on Saturday. Boo. Apparently when they say tickets go on sale at 10 am Pacific, they mean you can enter the queue earlier than 10 am. Knowing this, I'll have to try again on the 30th.

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When WOW crosses your day job

When I'm not playing a resto druid, I play the role of a healthcare consultant (waiting for the oohs and aahs.... yeah right). Healthcare uses a lot of acronyms, some of which overlap with WOW. So, here is what was going through my mind the other day during one of my many many meetings.

K:Oh gawd, I'm really really tired of all these meetings. We waste too much time and could be actually getting work done. I should be running these meetings the way I lead raids.

Voice in the distance: ...we should be looking at 4 WOWs then?

K: Huh? WOW? What, they're going to be playing WOW in the exam rooms now? Oh, wait they're talking about workstations on wheels WOWs, not our game WOW. So I wonder how long it will take me to fish up the turtle mount and get the new Strand Crawler pet. I'm getting a little annoyed its taking so long...

Voice in the distance: ...but is that nursing station in line of sight of those exam rooms?

K: Line of sight? Has someone gotten out of line of sight for my heals? Oh wait, damn it! Not that kind of line of sight. So hmmm I'm curious to see how a real attempt at Kologarn is going to go...

Voice in the distance: ...how many tanks do we have there again?

K: Well that would depend on what boss we're doing. Wait, what? Number of tanks in the respiratory room? I don't give a crap! Speaking of tanks, I wonder when I last did a post that made fun of Jess...

Voice in the distance: ...will CC be listed on the tracker board?

K: What? Is Vel sheeping things here? Is Ata sapping things again? Oh damn, you mean CC, chief complaint! Sigh, why are these silly meeting people disturbing my daydreams with WOW speak?

Anyone else faced with WOW acronyms during your day job?

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Time warp?

Was is it about WOW that distorts your sense of time? I'm sure we all have experienced the "Oh my gosh I was just going to be on for an hour" or "Holy crap look how long I've been on" or "Can Blizzard please stop automatically displaying the standard days played info when you log in?" sense of distorted time.

So I was not online this past Tuesday night, but did log on very briefly last night. When I came online, a comment was made to the gist of "Oh look who it is!". Really? After one night offline? Though I guess when you're used to seeing someone on all the time, one night does seem like longer.

I have been on the other side of this because when Paradise had to take some time off for final exams, it seemed like he had been gone forever! Months at least! When he did come back, I whispered him asking where the heck he had been, and that he had been gone for so long, to which he replies "It's only been two weeks K".

Maybe there is some multiplier to time in WOW. Maybe one night in WOW is the equivalent of two nights in real life? Three nights?

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Bring protection to Ulduar... and more guild sillies

Part of why I love running in my guild is that I'm surrounded by peeps who are just as sarcastic and silly as I am. A couple of recent funnies from the last week or so to share:

1. In reference to the fire buff that jumps from person to person leading up to Ignis:

Jess: This fire buff is like a venereal disease. It jumps from person to person and it burns.

Oh really Jess? Hmmm.... so apparently protection in Ulduar refers to more than just a certain type of pally and our little white ponytailed warrior is not as innocent as Jess would like for us to believe. Who knew?

2. We had one very brief first try/look at Kologarn the other week. We didn't expect to be seeing him when we did, so no one had really read up on the encounter. So we had our hunter Chachi explain the fight since he has tanked it on another character. I'm not sure exactly what it was, but the combination of Chachi talking about arms and bellybuttons, along with a lot of guild chatter around lint and arm pits made for the funniest boss explanation ever. Everyone was rolling in hysterics. Or maybe boss explanations are just funnier when they are given in a Canadian accent. Ya know, Eh?

Anyways, the guild message afterwards? "Death to the bellybutton!" Because yeah, you gotta watch out for the bellybuttons!

3. A couple weeks ago we were doing an easy run through Naxx with a number of alts. Chachi's holy priest alt, Brbafk (I do love his name!) was healing along with yours truly. So there we are getting ready to start Heigan. The gist of the vent conversation:

Brbafk: Wait, I need a bit.
Jess: Huh? What's going on?
Brbafk: Hold on, I just have to fix something.
K: Like what?
Indigogo: Um, so Brbafk doesn't know how to dispel disease.
Entire guild: What?!?!
Indigogo: Yeah, I'm trying to tell Brbafk to find the spell and put it the spell bar.
Brbafk: Shut up guys! I know what to do!
Entire guild: (much much mockery and laughter)
K: Oh gawd... should I just overheal when we run back up on the platform?

Poor Chachi. I really love the guy, but he often gets a lot of crap from me. How can you resist though? He's a hunter!

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Emoting

I've become a big fan of emoting. I stuck with only the standard emotes for a long time, until I learned that you can /em anything. Anything! Our king of emotes is our gnome mage Nkm, pictured here with Buns. I made them stand for a pic because they are so freakin' cute.

Anyways, here's an emote "conversation" from a while back with Nkm when we were waiting to start a raid run and I had my Seb (Magical Crawdad out):

Nkm is sad because he really hates fishing and he'll never be able to get the Magical Crawdad and then he won't be able to get the 75 pets achievement
Keredria is thinking that is a long ass emote

Seriously though, Nkm really has the funniest emotes, which I think I expressed as an emote. And just as an update, he did get the Magical Crawdad. :)

However, Nkm is not the only emoter in the guild. Our rogue Terrondris is a big emoter when he isn't busy teabagging anyone who has died (which is another post all together). One emote that he has somehow reserved strictly for me (I'm touched T, just touched) is:

Terrondris pats Keredria's bedonkadonk

Its funny because I was in IF one day and a lower level stranger who I did not know at all emoted patting or pinching my bedonkadonk! I immediately knew that it was one of T's alts and whispered him.

Another reason that I love emoting is that it allows you to talk across factions. When I encounter asshat Hordies, I am a big emoter. But when I run across Horde who has helped me in some way, or waited their turn to finish some daily, I emote thanks to them as well.

Now the other day when the fishing daily was to get the Terrorfish in Wintergrasp, I get there to see this:

Whoa, holy crap! I've never seen a concentration of so many fishers outside of the fishing tournament. Anyways, we're all working on getting our fish, when I notice that a Horde rogue (I forget his name) was stealthing around flagged. He was kind of going from person to person, standing behind them and emoting a number of things. I'm not sure if he was trying to start something or what. But it seemed that everyone else was just ignoring him. However when he came to me:

Keredria wonders why "Hordie rogue" has nothing better to do
"Hordie rogue" laughs.
"Hordie rogue" agrees.
"Hordie rogue" wishes Keredria luck and bids Keredria farewell!

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Level 4 of WOW geekdom

Level 1 - You play WOW
Level 2 - You play WOW and you blog about it
Level 3 - You play WOW and you blog about it and you are thinking of going to Blizzcon
Level 4 - You play WOW and you blog about it and you are thinking of going to Blizzcon and you are thinking about blogging about going to Blizzcon

/sigh. I am trying to see if some guildies/friends will meet up with me there. Anyone been to Blizzcon? Anyone else thinking of going? FYI, first tickets for the August 21 and 22 event in Anaheim go online for sale this Saturday, May 16.

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K as a young sapling...

Averna tagged me to talk about what I remember about being a newbie, a post idea that originated from Miss Elf. I must say that I don't remember a whole lot from those sapling days. Did I just repress those painful memories? Or is it due to my standard habit of forgetting a lot of stuff? Anyways, here's what I can remember being a young sapling:

- I did notice when I first got my first talent point, but spent them with no method to the madness. I think I was some crazy combination of all three trees until level 30 or so.

- I had major issues with just plain old navigation. Yeah I was that toon who you saw getting tripped up on every door frame and knocking into sides of buildings. Repeatedy. Poor K ran around most of Darnassus and Darkshore with two black eyes. The worst was that huge tree in Darnassus that circled up and around. I think I fell off that path (and died) several several times.

- I was kind of scared of other players. Sounds silly, but its true. My first ever party invitation to do a group quest came from Adamas, someone I still talk to and raid with to this day (crazy). I remember being so nervous and scared that I was going to screw up.

- As a newbie healer, it took me a while to understand the concept of aggro and that I needed to run towards Jess when I got it. Why would I run towards the mean angry mobs? You run away from danger! There were many many situations where you'd see a crazy healer running all around, being chased by mobs, being chased by Jess.

- It never even crossed my mind that female toons could be played by male players and male toons could be played by female players. Never. I assumed that everyone knew that I was female because duh, I played a female toon. Thus, I reached out to other female characters with naive excitement (yay girl power!) assuming that they were played by female players. Yeah... I learned that lesson quickly.

Hmmm so am I supposed to be tagging other folks? Well I tag:
Beruthiel at Falling Leaves and Wings (gorgeous gorgeous blog name!!!)
Misneach at Aggro Junkie
Sylly at Rolling Hots
And Jess at Pretty in Plate because Jess is still a noob.

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My communication philosohy

I've had some people recently email or whisper me in game saying that they liked my blog or a certain post. Sooo very nice. Thanks to you all. You guys are obviously incredibly smart and good looking people with impeccable taste. Clearly.

But as a blogger, you're bound to run into people who lie on the other end of the spectrum. I've had a couple of conversations with friends and bloggers about internet trolls. Here's my philosophy on how I think about them:

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Beware of Mr. Wiggles

In light of this whole swine flu craziness, a warning for those of you with the pig pet:

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Bringing up the next K

I got my adorable little mini me, the Teldrassil Sproutling about a week ago. Its a big responsibility bringing up the next generation of trees, and I take the responsibility of raising K 2.0 very seriously. There's a lot to teach this little twig! I started by giving her a lecture on all she needed to learn.

But she seemed a bit confused and all I saw on her face was a wooden stare (lawl), so I decided I needed to show her what it meant to be my mini me. First I tried to take her herbing, though not to too much success. Apparently this little one finds herbing a bit boring for her taste? Blasphemy my little one, blasphemy!

Ok ok, how about fishing little K?

I also took her around to celebrate her first holiday.

Ok so there's herbing, and fishing, and taking part in world events. But I also needed to introduce her to the world of raiding, thus off to Ulduar we go! I was hoping that my sister tree Indi could help me focus the little one beyond falling asleep and dancing.

But instead of following our lead in throwing out our hallelujah praise the lord branchy HoTs, she got distracted by Vel's beauty.

Sigh... this little twig has a long way to go, but we'll get there. Its quite exhausting though being a student and a teacher!

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Bunnehs take over Ulduar

We went back to Ulduar for the second time this past weekend. While we were waiting for the group to form one night, we thought we'd amuse ourselves by turning into bunnies at the stone. Why? Because everything is better with bunnehs. (And yes, they are spelled that way.)

I thought it was super cute that a rogue's stealth and a shammy's shield thingie also translates in bunny form, though its a little hard to see Atania's stealthing bunny behind me in this pic on the left:

After a bit, a bunch of folks from a horde guild started showing up. I'm not sure if they were wanting us to get flagged or what, but they started standing in the middle of our little bunny party and casting aoes and whatnot. I emoted myself nibbling on a bunch of their ankles, unfortunately to no response:

Ok, on to serious business now. Here is a shot of us after one shotting XT-002, who I hear has been nerfed, but was fun nonetheless. Surprisingly, I didn't find the raid damage too bad to heal during the tantrums. Though maybe that was because I had a kickass priest and fantabulous tree healing with me (Hai2U Suzzy and Indi!) There were a couple comments from the boys that XT-002 was clearly a female because "she" has tantrums. /sigh

However, we had some trouble with getting Razorscale down. I think at first we weren't bringing her down fast enough with the harpoons. We were trying to wait until we cleared some more of the trash before bringing her down, but then we weren't getting enough dps on her. Then when we got that part down, we had to figure out how to navigate her and the raid around during the second phase. But finally, we got her!

I must say though that this Razorscale kill felt incredibly good and satisfying. I was proud that we were clearly improving and learning the fight during each attempt and no one was negative throughout all of the wipes. Yeah, wiping sucks, but people were positive pointing out that we were clearly getting better and what we could do next time. When we got her down, I think the 10 of us were all performing at our peak individually and as a collective unit. I must say that I was much more proud of this boss kill than any of our boss kills in Naxx. It reminded me of how we felt when we downed Shade or Prince back in the day in Kara.

Or maybe the secret to getting Razorscale down is to turn your raid members into bunnehs. Of course I had to make the comment, "Y'all are my bunneh bitches!" Heh heh. Sorries guildies.

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