Bye Bye Birdie

So over last weekend I got the news that some of the higher up officers in my guild were transferring servers. And by that I mean they had been talking about it apparently for a while and decided to switch during a 7 hour period that I was offline. It was a great “Happy Fourth of July!” moment when I logged on briefly in the morning to mail something to a friend before showering and beginning my day and, low and behold, the guild leader messaged me on an alt telling me what had happened.

I’m not angry at them. At all. But this has happened to me before, where my guild broke up because friends were transferring to another server, and it’s a little disheartening. Honestly, I don’t play the game because I want to get the best loot, or even necessarily to see the end-game content. Really, I play it because I sometimes like an escape from the “real world” for a few hours, and sometimes I enjoy some semi-solitude, away from my real life friends (who definitely mean the world to me but to whom I’ve given almost all of my attention during the school year and ignored my WoW friends) and just chill with people, playing a game that’s quite fun and silly, but allows me to explore my fantasy-loving, slightly nerdy side.  And from playing and RPing, I’ve made several friends who I grew to know and really like/respect as people, and were willing to call my friends, albeit via interwebz.

All of this to say that, when these friends up and leave the server that we played on together, I get a little frustrated and, I’ll admit it, a little sad and upset. Even when running with PuGs, I always had vent to chat in, or guild chat if I didn’t feel like talking very much. And the point of those PuGs? To gear myself up when everyone was off doing their own thing, so that I could join them on their raids and we could all be part of the same discussion with the same goals–downing the boss, getting out loot, challenging ourselves and our knowledge of our classes, specs, and working as a team, while having fun with people you like and whose company you enjoy.

The last two times this has happened resulted in a depart from the game, or at least my mains. For  a long while, after the first time it happened, I didn’t play on Tennenmaho for a couple of months, at least not regularly. I felt lost on Ten’nen with all of his RP/raiding friends gone, so instead of continuing to play him, and since I couldn’t afford the transfer, I leveled up another toon on Moon Guard and continued to try to play with my friends and RP with them. Then I happened to go back to Ravenholdt one day and got involved in a guild that I grew to love a lot, and in whom I made several friends. We raided a bunch, and while I never made it to T6 content, I still had fun.

At the end of last summer, though, the drama llama walked in and the guild exploded. Once again, I felt very lost whenever I logged into the game–I felt I had no goals to accomplish other than dailies. So, I essentially left the game until Winter Break, where I finally got back in it and was invited to Dismemberment by Purgeron, a paladin who, during the last summer, I’d helped out a lot in raids by providing a DPS boost and my knowledge of ZA and TK. So I joined, got up to 80, played scantily over the semester, then after classes ended, I plunged back into the game with a bit more committment.

Now that another group of friends have left…well, it’s like a cycle. I feel a little lost once again. I stil have friends in the game, of course, but it’s a very different feeling when you’re all playing together to achieve a common goal, ya know? For now, I’m just going to continue to level my priest, do my dailies on both Ten’nen and Prialeson so I’m not eternally poor, and try to find a new guild. There are a couple of different guilds in which I have friends that I don’t think I’d mind joining, but at the same time, I might just make a guild with some of my remaining friends on the server, and then whore myself out as DPS to my friends’ guilds, making those my unofficial raiding guilds.

But we’ll see. Hopefully my feet will get planted again. Until then, I may spend some time leveling my hunter on Moon Guard some more, and RPing with him.  For now, I’ll just bide my time and try to enjoy the game as much as possible.

/end QQ

Naxxramas is Serious Business

I was never under the impression that I would be anything more than an off-healer, which as a paladin is totally possible (and really fun) if you love spamming Flash of Light and Holy Shock on raid members, while keeping Beacon of Light up at all times on…you know, someone else, like the tank. It’s sort of like whack-a-mole. See someone dying? WHAM! Flash of Light! What? Stupid ret paladin keeps pulling aggro because they turned on Righteous Defense with Pally Power? BOOM! Holy Shock (yes, a crit!) Aw, poor mage has no stamina…KAPOW! Instant Flash of Light! And look, my tank is still alive–just how I like it.

Well, we decided to do a Naxx 10 run with a bunch of alts of guild members. Boy were we pleasantly surprised to find ourselves having a few problems…by wiping on Anub. Don’t laugh. Try as we might, we just couldn’t get past him. OF course, most of us needed to gear up in Naxx 10, so the first wipe wasn’t totally unexpected. The third…you know what? No comment.

Turns out Unholy DK’s just don’t quite have the damage mitigation needed for that fight as well as other classes…instead, every time Locus Swarm came out, Anub (>0< spider power!) would get really hungry and gobble up our tank for dinner. In 2 hits. Without giving me time to do more than Holy Shock and Flash of Light…once.  So the ret pally switched to heals as well and had to crit our tank for like, 18k heals or something ridiculous so he could survive. Anyway, we made it through Anub…

To fight the poison bitch. And man, was she a bitch. Tonight was like something got stuck somewhere it shouldn’t and she was taking her rage out on us. It took our DPS DK (not the tank) bringing in his Warrior tank, our DK tank switching to DPS, and our warlock (who was rather undergeared, unfortunately) to bring in her Retadin (who did nice dps, but died easily >.<) for us to even contemplate surviving. But eventually, we made it through her…and then went on to Maexxna.

This fight was a lot smoother. In fact, we one shot her. I was standing there, Sacred Shielding the tank, keeping up Beacon of Light, and just healing my ass off generally. But I kept watching people get healed and thinking “Man, that other healer is outhealing me bad. I feel useless.” We lost two people due to being webbed on the wall, but it couldn’t be helped. I was out of range and I assumed the other healer was too.

Then someone posted the DPS charts. And I noticed that the “other healers” were in fact close to the top of the DPS charts. So I asked in vent “How the hell did you do so much dps while healing?” and they went “I wasn’t healing.” So I paused for a second and tried to figure it out–it was confuzzling. Well, the guild leader, Purgeron (a paladin who was building his tank set, but is holy and healing 25-man Ulduar) goes “Let me check the healing meters then.” I hear him click. I hear his mic go off, then back on. I hear him go “Well, this is surprising. Congrats, Ten. You just solo healed Maexx. Even I’ve never done that before.”

Lol wut?

I sat there, stupified, and checked my own meters. Sure, the ret pally had healed herself a ton during that fight with her and my judgements of light and keeping Seal of Light up (she knew she died easily) but that accounted for less than 20% of the healing. The rest were my pitiful Holy Shocks and Flash of Lights that I kept tossing around in a frenzy. I’m not a bragger, and I know that if I’d known I was the only healer, I’d *never* have been able to do it, but it was nice to know that, after needing a little help on Grand Widow and Anub, it wasn’t all totally my fault. I’m sure plenty of people have solo healed Maexx before. In mostly blues, a few greens, and the epic sword I picked up off of Grand Widow though? I dunno. I don’t think I’ll be able to do it again. But for that one fight, man was that cool.

Now to fix my spec a bit (I don’t mind cookie cutter healing specs–if it helps people stay alive, I’m game) so I have more crit. And maybe one day I’ll be able to do it on my own, again. Maybe. For now? Back to the gear grind.