I have been blogging about WoW for two years! Two years!

I can’t really believe that, it seems to have passed so quickly. And somehow, so much has happened during these years. I’ve had so much fun and the odd piece of heartache and pain as well, and this blog has served me well throughout it all as an outlet for my feelings and my wandering interests in the WoW world.

The Blog

My first post was spawned after having read on WoWInsider about druid blogger, BigBearButt was there and Phaelia and some others I sadly can’t remember anymore. I liked reading their posts and I though, hey, I want to blog too!

I spent some time thinking about a good name, and finally I settled on Reflections From The Pond.

I started out at Blogspot, and I had been blogging there for almost a year to the day, when something horrible happened. The horribleness was sorted eventually, but the entire thing had seriously dented my faith in Blogspot, and in January 2009 I moved to this self-hosted Wordpress site, where I have been hanging out since.

My focus for the blog is and have always been the World of Warcraft, but often I found fiddling with the blog’s appearance and different widgets as fun as actually playing, so I have actually learned a bit about html and php without actually intending too.

In these two years I have published 163 posts (164 with this one), and I have 79 drafts not yet published. Some of those are unpublished because I lost interest for the topic, some because I ended up rambling in circles and not getting anything said, some are unposted because I wrote them when I was seriously upset but calmed down during the writing and left them in the drafts drawer because they were mean or evil or plain down whining.

The posts have spanned a variety of subjects, from detailed class reviews to macro and addons guides to more general silliness and tearful drama, and I have not yet managed to stick to a publishing schedule of any kind.

My favourite post are the silly ones, like  Star Wars Spirit of Redemption and Where does the druid’s gear go? and Mae WoW, or the slightly wistful ones like Through the Dark Portal or Life After WoW.

The most popular one, or at least the one with most hits, is the one about Vareesa’s Copper Coin, which also was a fun one to research and write (which reminds me, I still have a few posts left to do in that coin series – might get an energy injection for that now that my shammy’s levelling fishing).

All in all, it has been a long strange trip for me these last two years, and I plan to reminisce a little about this and what has made the journey worthwile in a few coming posts, but for now I will just say:

Happy Second Anniversary Blog!

Gold in my pockets, itching to be spent!

Dual Talent Specialization, here I come!

Since my enhancement gear consist of a gladiator chest someone must have pawned off on me on some VoA run when I wasn’t looking, I decided to go elemental. Lightning Bolts and Lava Bursts, Flame Shocks and Thunderstorms!

I did actually have a lot of gear I could adapt to the more pewpewy shaman ways, but since it was all old worn resto gear it was heavily deficient on the hit rating side.

A few new gems and enchants later, it was not so heavily deficient, but still a lot short of the magic number 263, which seems to be the hit cap for elemental shamans with their racial skill and Elemental Precision and hoping for your friendly neighbourhood shadow priest or boomkin to hang around close by.

A quick look-round turned up a head enchant with hit rating which looked interesting. Only downside was that it required Revered with the Sha’tar, you know those caretakers in that big old forgotten city of Shattrah? And since my shammy was a latecomer on the scene she did not have that much rep, she was about a thousand short of being honored, so in total she would need about 13 k rep.

Now, how to get that?

There were a few quests that gave Sha’tar rep but I didn’t remember if I had done them or not and I didn’t really fancy going all over Outland to try to find out where I had ditched them – gief a quest tracker that tells you where you dumped the quest chain!

However, the Tempest Keep instances gives Sha’tar rep, in both the normal and heroic variety. So my shammy trundled off there, flew up to the Mechanar and started the kill spree.

And she died.

Those nasty Arcane Guardians hit for a lot even on a mail-clad lvl 80, and they call for help!

So it was no easy peasy walk in the park, it did take some planning and Hexing, but it was not that bad, the mini bosses were pretty easy and soon she faced the first real boss in there.

And soon he was dead.

She had originally planned to just kill mobs up to the first boss, maybe try him out and see how hard it was, but then reset the instance and farm rep again, but the not-too-hard boss kill bolstered her and she went on to the next one, the fire-loving Nethermancer Sepethrea.

Long suppressed memories of this horrible boss was suddenly brought back and I died and died and died. Having only a few instant-cast attacks which also share a cooldown made it difficult to get enough spells off before the elementals were upon me and beat me to death together with their lady chief, and I needed to focus on dps and not healing myself because it only prolonged the agony.

This only spurred me on though, and my plans of quick rep farming was gone – I was going to beat this boss! And I did! A combination of heroism, fire elemental, elemental spec and resto gear, lifeblood, gift of the naaru and a rather large piece of luck made the flaming lady bite the dust eventually!

Wohoo! Who dah shammy?!?

The gauntlet up to the last boss and the boss himself was a piece of cake in comparison, and I snagged me the Mechanar achievement and about 2 k of Sha’tar rep.

The next day I went to the Botanica, and there was nothing in there that was really difficult, I breezed through it and got the Botanica ach and another couple of k of Sha’tar rep.

Was going to get me the quest for the Arcatraz key and also attempt the heroic versions of these instances, but the acute need for the head enchant was removed by a new pair of legs won with a lucky offspec roll and a new ring from the Headless Horseman.

Still, it was very fun soloing these instances with my shaman, and I do think I will go there again and try out the heroics.

Because, you know, who dah shammy?!?

I’ve always thought epic was, you know, epic. I hear that word and my head fills with images of grandeur and awesomeness, of fantastic tales of love and terror and marvellous adventures affecting a whole world. Epicness, simple as that.

In WoW and according to Blizzard, Epic denotes a certain level of item rarity.

You can find poor items all over, common ones too, uncommon items are (surprise!) slightly less common than common ones, rare items are rare, epic items are rarer and legendary items are rarest of them all.

After having played this game for some three years I am still rooted in the belief that epic actually is epic, that once I get an epic item I need never look further, I can sit back and relax and treasure my own, my beloved, my preciousss rings with matching preciousss jewellery and assssorted garments.

I guess my never getting past tier 4 raiding in TBC can partially explain this, I never actually got the chance to regularly replace my epic items because the ones I wore were the absolute top of the line for me, the best that I could attain. Sure, I had my share of badge gear as well but most of what I was wearing actually dropped for me from some boss or other and I had wrested it from a still-warm dead body after having made a lucky roll. In a very Tam-like way.

Enter WotLK.

I actually wore most of my sssweet and preciousss things until level 80. I still wear some of them, my durids tank rings for example, her well-earned Violet Signet and her Shermanar Great-Ring, both from Karazhan.

Now that is epic to me. Those things were so good, so awesome, so grand and wonderful that I did not need to replace them during all my Northrend adventures while levelling, and yet they were only from the first tier of raiding in TBC.

I could totally live with the fact that the Northrend level 80 epics would be even more grand and awesome than my level 70 epics and that I had to replace my well-worn gear when I hit 80 and started adventuring with the big boys and girls. I mean, it’s a whole whopping ten levels difference.

But then I realised that the level 80 epics I started accruing during my Naxx10 runs and through various crafting friends and reputation aquiantances, they were not really epics at all. They were slightly less than epic, apparently.

Even Blizzard themselves say so as the Naxx10 gear and similar does not count as epics in the (infamous) Epic achievement. Apparently, the real epic gear is being handed out in Naxx25 or in raiding instances a tad more respectable than Naxx10.

It seems that although all epics are epic, some epics are more epic than others.

One of them, my Aerie Peak guild where I have most of my chars and where up until a month ago I was an officer, is a  casual raid guild filled with fun and friendly and nice people.

The other one, my Stormrage guild to which I applied and got invited with my shaman a month ago, is a raid guild filled with fun and friendly and nice people.

Real life constraints (raid end times vs my getting up in the morning times) had made me unable to raid seriously with my Aerie Peak guild for a long time and as I had been working on getting around this in a variety of ways without success and the only way untried was emo’ing my way to making the raids end earlier, I decided to not put my guildies through that since everyone seemed happy with things the way they were and applied to another guild where the raid hours suited me better.

I didn’t make a secret of this, I told my fellow officers about it and when I got accepted I retired as officer, telling everyone why and where I was going with my shaman and I kept all my other chars in the guild.

I retired because it would not feel right to still have a say in what the guild was doing and where it was going when I was raiding with another guild, and also because the months of trying to make things work for me had been rather draining my energy and I wanted to relax a little and not worry about every little thing.

I still play all my chars on Aerie Peak a lot, and I raid with my Aerie Peak guild too when I get the chance. Why shouldn’t I, they are all sweet and nice and wonderful people and really I like playing with them. I would not have applied to another guild had I been able to raid with them more.

Because I like to raid. It is fun, it is challenging and it is social. I like to quest and play solo a lot too, but if I hadn’t been able to raid at all I think I would have quit the game.

So to satisfy my raid itch, I found this Stormrage guild, and you know what? They are also sweet and nice and wonderful people, they dragged me into their chat channels and bid me welcome and didn’t blow up on me when I made mistakes.

I was worried at first, they are focused about their raiding, they do 25mans and hard modes and although I really wanted to try it out I was not sure I was cut out for those challenges. But you know what, I was and it’s fun! Great fun!

So I was happy, getting to know my new guildies on Stormrage and still spending a lot of time with my guildies on Aerie Peak. I was eating my cake and having it too.

I made a point of not mixing the two guilds, if anyone asked me I answered, but I didn’t volunteer any information or told stories from one guild in the other. I do not think one guild to be better than the other, they are simply two guilds with different styles, both good.

Also, I was terrified of my Aerie Peak guildies thinking I now saw myself as teh uber raider, doing all these 25 mans hard modes, or that someone would feel I was trying to poach people from one guild to the other. So I kept quiet and kept having fun in both places.

And then drama flared in my Aerie Peak guild.

The GM left, being badly burned out, and one of the officers and raid leaders left as well, saying he is going to make a new guild dedicated to more focused 10man raiding. Nobody else have yet left but some people have signed off the raid core and it is not unlikely that more people will leave.

The new GM, a lovely and passionate and adorable person whom I really care about and who was appointed officer just before I retired, came to me in her need and asked me to help out, and perhaps even coming back to being an officer.

I would do anything to help my guild and this girl out, she is absolutely outstanding in her dedication and passion and will to make things work and a fun giggly person to boot, I might even consider being an officer advisor or similar for some time til everythings sorted out, if they want me.

But I am not going to leave my Stormrage guild. I told her this, and it was perfectly ok.

And as my Stormrage guild is recruiting and could use a few more people for our coming hard mode attempts, I also told her that I might ask a few of the people who left, if any, to join me on Stormrage. Not asking them before they left, or even hinting that I would ask them, or in any way leaning or persuading or poking someone to leave. Not poaching on my Aerie Peak guild, because the people I’d ask would not be in the guild anymore, but rather poaching on the guild my ex-guildie is forming.

Logical, and clever, don’t you think? Any people leaving my Aerie Peak guild now is not leaving because I asked them, they are leaving of their own accord, right?

I wish it wouldn’t make me feel like such a rat.

It is when someone I know comes up to me and says “we need to talk”. Guess I am one of those that see the glass as half empty because that “we need to talk” opener, however worded, always fills me with apprehension of the bad kind.

So when one of the officers in my new guild whispers me just before raid start and ask if I have a minute to spare because she wants to talk to me you can imagine what happened. Did someone suddenly turn down the temperature in the room?

I know I haven’t been slacking too much in this last month I have raided with my shammy. I have made some a few a lot of mistakes, but I like to think I have learned from them and did not do them twice, and also think that I managed to do a few many some things right from the start.

So this talk a month after I got invited to the guild when I happen to know after having read somewhere that a new members’ trial period is a month should not be something to be afraid of, right? If I sucked badly they would have told me something before, right? Right? Right?

Still, I shiver a little as she asks me how I like it in the guild.

I reply truthfully – I like it a lot! The people are fun and friendly and nice and helpful, the raid leaders are calm and cool and I have a lot of fun raiding there.

And then she replies to me, saying not the words I dreaded but those I hoped to hear – they are happy with me and would like to offer me a full membership!

Yes! Yes, please! Thank you!

I still tremble but as I get promoted from Trialist to Raider in Adrenaline those clammy shivers are now replaced by a broad smile and tears welling up in my eyes and I jump up and down in excitement.

I R Raider!

Blue

Green

Red

Black

You got it right at the first try? Congratulations!

Me, I always stumble on this, I start to say that the letters of the word Blue are blue although I clearly see they are red, and it takes an actual effort of will to look past the word itself and say the colour.

Red! The letters are red, dammit!

For me, the words clearly have much more weight than the color they are written in, I have trouble un-seeing the semantic value of the words and see them as colours only, devoid of any other inherent meaning.

I got reminded of this after looking at a few different guild applications lately (both of the guilds I am in are recruiting and new applications pop up every week) – some people write long, well disposed applications which seems to indicate that they have put a lot of thought and effort into it and really want to join, and some people copy-paste the application template and answer in leet-speak and monosyllabics, yes, no, u and i, things like that, and of course capital letters or periods are nowhere to be seen, which seems to indicate that this person wrote the application on his/her 5 minute coffee break and isn’t really that interested in joining this particular guild.

But am I (and many others with me) biased here too, getting fooled by the semantics and failing to see the colours?

Now, I don’t like leet speak. I don’t like people skipping out on capital letters and punctuation marks. I accept that people use it as a shorthand in chats and in forum posts – I even do that myself – but a guild application is not something you need to rush through. I doubt many guilds are that choked for applicants that a few extra seconds spent typing ‘you’ instead of ‘u’ are going to seriously impede your chances of getting invited.

Leet speak is adequate for short fast typing but for anything lenghtier than a few sentences it sucks and I hope your application will contain more than that. You don’t necessarily have to do like me and orate on forever and ever about just anything, but I guess most guilds have a “tell us about yourself”-section or similar in their application templates, and I hope you manage to flesh ut out a bit.

And unlike what many people seem to think, grammar and spelling and punctuation is not something invented by sadistic language teachers, it is actually a very useful tool when you want to communicate with people. The punctuation breaks the information flow up into easily digestable chunks, the capital letters helps by making it easier for the eye to see where new sentences start and also by flagging some words as more important, namely names with their initial capital letters, the spelling makes people understand what you are talking about, is it faces or faeces or fascists?

So, having said that I think it weighs in your favor if you make an intelligible application, if you use the language tools available (including spellchecker) and wrap it up nicely in small easily readable and digestable chunks.

That is only half the work though, the other half is having something to say, and you know what, brevity is not necessarily a bad thing.

But since the application you put in will in many cases be the first contact the majority of the guild have with you and their only way of determining what you are like and if you will fit in the guild it is not in your own interest to try to make your personality show through the lines, to give your possible new guild mates a prewiev of what you are like? Isn’t that rather hard to do that if you limit yourself to the barest minimum?

I think I can get over my aversion to distaste for leet speaks and spelling errors and such if the applicant manages to convey a real interest in the guild, a true wish to be part of the fun and has shown willing to put some effort into it.

In that case I think – I hope – I can see beyond the semantics and actually see the true colour of the application, and in it a hint of the true colours of the person behind it.

When the special shadow effects were introduced some time ago I got seasick from them and turned them down to the barest minimum where you could still see shaped shadows and not just formless blobs.

I’ve ran all of 25-man Naxxramas (AoE heaven, remember?) without any problems at all, and although I mostly raided 10-mans after that up till just a few weeks ago I never ever had any problems with lag or disconnects during raids apart from the very rare power cut or similar total loss of net access. Never!

Now, enter patch 3.2.2.

The release of this patch coincided with me moving my shaman to another server and starting running 25-mans with her.

On these 25-man raids with her I have been disconnected from the game once or twice per raid night.

It may not sound much but it is one time (or two!) too many, especially since it seems to happen in every fekking raid!

If I am “lucky”, it happens during the startup phase, only making me miss portals to Theramore for Onyxia or the generously provided Fish Feast.

If I am not so lucky, it happens during an encounter. And in case you haven’t noticed or maybe it has slipped your mind, the encounters nowadays are pretty damn unforgiving of people standing still.

Standing still, you know, like someone who has just lost all her control over her toon by disconnecting but said toon is still in the game, still in the raid, and she is NOT MOVING when Kologarn looks at her nastily, and she is NOT MOVING when the blue sparkly roaches start trailing to Thorim and she is NOT MOVING when the lava around Sartharion and his three hench drakes starts churning.

And if the disconnect didn’t do enough damage, either collateral by me and my uncontrolled toon drawing hurt to my fellow raiders, or incidental by me not throwing my heals where I was supposed to, when I do manage to log back in the dc always, always, ALWAYS screws with my healing addons.

I lose all the raid frames, and even if I manage to do a /reload ui while back online, the reloading screen takes forever and ever to load through and all that time I am NOT MOVING.

And even if I do get through that prolonged hell of waiting and having to listen on Vent to what is happening and I actually do get the raid frames back, sometimes they are not sorted, sometimes they are not clickable, and sometimes the amount of health they show are frozen and unchanging!

The clickability comes back once either I or the boss is dead, but the randomness of the sorting linger on.

(Incidentally, this is why I had a brief session of  Earth Shielding the druid tree instead of the druid bear last night, because my main tank setting was lost and the spot in my raid frames grid where the bear used to be was now taken by the tree – same orange color and their names are similar enough for me not to react immediately (hey! It’s not like I read all the names on the raid frames!))

Turning down all graphic settings to the absolute minimum does not seem to help at all, I was playing with that last night and I still got dc’d.

Sometimes I wonder if it is server-related – I find Dalaran on Stormrage way more laggy than I find Dalaran on Aerie Peak – but maybe that is just a matter of me being in Stormrage Dalaran during peak hours more often than on Aerie Peak where I am mostly out in the bush or the old world.

Sometimes I wonder if it is raid-related – I raid 25-mans on Stormrage and 10-mans on Aerie Peak, but then again I have done the odd 25-mans on Aerie Peak too after the patch and although my fps was very low at times I never got dc’d.

Sometimes I wonder if it is computer-related – my computer is not the most modern and fastest one, and is generally slow when tabbing in and out of WoW, but why have I not encountered these horrbible dc’s before patch 3.2.2 then? I seem to have had more dc’s after 3.2.2 than in my entire WoW history before that.

No, I firmly believe patch 3.2.2 is the root of all this evil – it is the patch from hell!

Well I’m sitting by my game rig
But the frame rate’s way too low
And it lags with every spell cast that I try out

And I’m standing still while running
In the raiding fireworks
Scared beyond belief to get the login screen

And this perverted fear of dc’s
Chokes the smile on my face
And common sense is ringing out the bells

This is a technological breakdown
Oh yes, this is the patch from hell

And all my addons got resetted
And there’s nothing I can do
It’s all just bits of pixels not controlled by me

Oh look out world, take a good look what comes down here
I must learn this lesson fast and learn it well

This ain’t no fresh exciting new content
Oh no, this is the patch
Said this is the patch
This is the patch from hell!

(And fear not, I am not going to sing out. Well, not loudly at least. Well, maybe loudly but in the shower only where no one can hear me.)

Swedish or English, I’ve always been curious about words and their origins and I love finding new ones and synonyms for old ones.

I used to giggle inside when I knew more words than my high school English teacher (can you believe she did not know that sorcerer was a synonym for magic user!) and I always flooded deluged my essays with lots of odd old words.

I guess to a native Englishman my way to speak and write is a peculiar mix of the different varieties of the language (British, American, Aussie, etc) and also I guess an odd mix of modern expressions, old idioms and my own constructions. 

Anyways, one thing that fascinates me with World of Warcraft is the words of the game.

There is a popular urban myth claiming that the Eskimos have hundreds of words for snow, but I wonder if Blizzard is not close on their tails there.

I mean, how many words for ice bolt can you think of? Or how many words for fiery bolt?

Well, you have the basic Fireball of course, but also Fire Blast (blast = to explode or destroy something), Scorch (wither or parch from exposure to heat), Pyroblast (pyro denoting fire, heat or high temperature), Immolate (to kill or destroy by fire), Searing Pain (searing = very hot), Incinerate (burn to ashes) and Conflagrate (burst into flames), for example. All very fanciful and imaginative and conjuring up images of fire and brimstone and devastating heat.

Same with the more wintry kind of spells, with variations of Blizzard, Frost, Ice and Icy, Icebound, Winter, Freeze, and Cold among the many different spells of the Frost schools (mages, death knights and shamans), and they all bring forth allusions to biting, debilitating, numbing coldness.

But there is one spell I just don’t get – Wrath. The word wrath means intense anger, often on an epic scale, and wrath is one of the cardinal sins (the rest of the sins also having grand names such as gluttony and sloth). I don’t see any connection at all to the Nature based druid dps spell, and given the imagination shown by Blizzard in naming spells of all kinds I do think they could have come up with something better for this streak of greenish-turqoise fire.

There is also all the different items dropped by mobs all over the world, given names ranging from the plain and simple like Light Feather to more eloquent ones like Sericeous Down (covered with fine silky hair).

For example, there is a quest in Zul’drak that requires you to gather Diatomaceous Earths and Banshee Essences. Now, diatomaceous means something that easily crumbles to dust, and diatomaceous earth is a naturally occuring chalk-like sedimentary rock, very porous and light. When I was doing this quest I started to try to get this word into our guild chat conversations, and my fellow guidlies were not slow to pick it up and it didn’t take long until diatomaceous seemed like a word as common as a very common thing.

And the words just keep coming.

Last night, for example, as we were doing Trial of the Champion, the Cord of Tenebrous Mist and The Dagger of Tarasque dropped from the Beasts of Northrend encounter there.

I asked what tenebrous meant because I had no clue, and got a reply from a friendly guildie that it meant shady (thanks!). Shady, dark and gloomy, and it dawned on me why one of Sartharion’s hench drakes is called this – Tenebron, who like the other two hench drakes does a lot of shadow damage.

(Sartharion’s other drakes are called Shadron and Vesperon, and I guess Shadron is a play on Shadow + the drake name ending -(r)on. Vesper is an archaic word for evening, which again hints strongly of shadows.)

Tarasque was another matter, and I got suggestions that maybe it was not a “who” but rather a “what”, like instead of a dagger of cheese it was a dagger of the material tarasque.

Subsequent research showed that Tarasque was not a material but a fearsome beast found in both mythology and Dungeons & Dragons, as well as in the French military where it denotes a towed 20 mm anti-aircraft gun.

It is also a statue in the town of Tarascon in France.

I wonder what new things I will learn in WoW tomorrow.

The well known quote of “Standing on the shoulders of giants” refers to how you can make intellectual progress by using the understanding gained by notable thinkers who have gone before you, to how much farther you can actually see from a slightly elevated position.

In WoW, most of us are standing on the shoulders of someone, perhaps not giants but gnomes, dwarves or maybe orcs. Very very few of us set out into the world intent on discovering it all ourselves (at least not after the first toon levelled to 80 :P).

We seek out information about where Mankrik’s wife can be found (yes, even I have done that quest on a lowbie Horde alt) instead of scouring the Barrens on our own and we happily use knowledge gathered by others to further our own understanding of the world and our abilities.

There is not that many of us that run into a new dungeon totally oblivious to what may come. Instead, we prefer to study videos made by those who really did go in not knowing what to expect and we read up on encounters and what information has leaked from various sources before we even enter the big ugly mofo’s lair.

When we see the big dragon lying asleep, curled up on the floor of her cave, we know that she has a nasty breath and a tail that will swipe if we come too close, we know she will fly up after a while and breathe lethal fire down upon us and we know her eggs had better be left untouched or we may regret it.

We have an inkling of what to expect and we work out a way to get what we want, sometimes by slavishly following someone else’s tactics, sometimes by tweaking those tacticts to suit our own group and abilities.

We are standing on the shoulders of gnomes, elves and orcs. We use the knowledge and information and tactics and understandings gained by the people who have gone before us.

Nothing wrong with this of course.

I don’t need to prove the Pythagorean Theorem myself before I use it – I can see the proof and understand it and gladly use it.

If I am going kayaking a weekend I want to know beforehand how to get up again in case the kayak does a flip and I get submerged, I don’t want to work it out on my own hanging upside down in the water.

If I am going to be part of an attempt to do the Assembly of Iron the hard mode way, ie killing Steelbreaker last, I want to know what I should look out for and how I should try to react to the various bad things coming my way.

(Now, those of you who know me know that I’ve usually been very keen on wanting to experience new dungeon and raid content fresh, of not knowing what to expect when I entered, of finding out myself why doing certain things are good and some are bad.

I have been very stubborn about this, but lately I have somwhat reluctantly acknowledged the fact that information does not always diminish the joy of the play.

Because while there are thrills and joys to be found in exploring and discovering things, there are also thrills and joys to be found in the execution of things, of having a theoretical if not yet practical knowledge of the steps of the dance and how to follow in your partner’s lead.

And, of course, the fact that most people I run with would already have a good knowledge of the fights and me refusing to listen did only leave me the noob might have had something to do with my changing my views on this as well :P)

This possibility to stand on other people’s shoulders is also why a generally bewildered and somewhat bedraggled raider like me can snag four achievements in a single boss kill. I was standing on the shoulders of both the people I’ve raided with before and the people I was raiding with that night as I went from doing 10mans the normal way to 25mans hard modes without going through any intermittent stages.

It makes me feel grateful and indebted and humble – regardless if you’re doing the social variety or the more hardcore one raiding really is a team effort and I hope that I can pay it back and that someday someone else will be standing on my shoulders.

That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, would it not?

But what about a rogue? Or a warrior or a shaman?

My first ever toon in WoW was my female human rogue Tessy. Tessy is my usual internet nick and my own second name.

Tessy the rogue was the one I explored most of Azeroth with, and being my first, she was also my precious, my flock leader, my main, my real main, regardless of the fact that she’s been mostly retired lately, cooking and fishing and pick-pocketing things.

When I transferred from my original server Vashj to Aerie Peak the name Tessy was taken there. Some lowbie Horde, not even high enough level to show up on the Armory, was apparently called Tessy and thus the game would not let me keep my name.

My warriors name was also taken, she was originally called Dizzie but there was already a gnome on the Peak called that. Finding a new name for her was not hard, she is now known as Daissy which I actually like better, somehow the girlish flowery sound of Daissy suits her lone fury warrior style way more than her first name, even though she no longer sports her pink pigtails but rather a thick reddish mane down her back.

Now, when I transferred my shaman Larue from the Peak to Stormrage, she faced the same trouble – someone had taken her name! I overcame this difficulty by adding an acute accent to the u, giving her the same name spelled Larúe. Maybe this will even improve things, helping people to pronounce it as she was often referred to as Laurie instead of La-ruu.

But what about Tessy?

I tried many different combinations and none of them felt right. Tess was taken and so was Tessie.

Unlike when I moved my shaman recently, I was at this time suffering from acute hatred of any kind of diacritic marks because of the difficulties involved in typing these when sending mails to or trying to invite people with marked names to groups so I was not even thinking of trying any of them out for myself.

To be able to play her at all and not be stuck in limbo I picked one of all bad varieties and ended up with Tessye.

Tessye! It feels so wrong! I am not Tessye, I am Tessy and I want my name back! Silly stupid e weighing down that pretty name!

I wonder if this is the reason (partly, at least) that I am reluctant to play her nowadays, because she feels like a stranger and not like my precious beloved slightly confused rogue who is as likely to sit down and smell the roses as she is to sneak around sapping mobs and picking their pockets or trying to backstab someone with her fishing rod equipped.

But having overcome my diacritiphobia somewhat by naming Larue Larúe, I wonder if I should maybe consider a name change for my rogue.

While I won’t be completely happy until she is Tessy again, I could perhaps be slightly happier if she was Téssy instead of Tessye?