I wonder if this constitutes a re-write of Rule #2 or an expansion thereof?

And in better news:

Pew Pew: Underpaint

Man, I might even get this pic done by new year at this rate. Also: She’s only got one boob. Tssch!

permalink » comment? » 46 words posted in: Adventures, Art, character:luxxa, character:ulfrun, lfg

So with my paladin, Sigyn, languishing at level 40, I did something silly; I bought a bunch of caster Heirlooms and rolled up a priest. I had this idea to level her solely in LFG, you see, after having had a taste of it on my lowbie Horde priest on Proudmoore while Mok’Nathal was down for 24 hour maintenance a couple of weeks ago. It seemed… pretty fun. Running RFC over and over and getting quick levels and easy blues.

So when the server was back up, I ground out some badges on Severin and bought myself the requisite Heirlooms, enchanted them with the ridiculously OP (and expensive) Molten Core enchants, and quested/PvP’d my new baby priest, Luxxa, up to level 15.

Then I jumped into LFG.

I figured I’d do a compare-and-contrast. Where Sigyn levelled entirely through quests, Luxxa would be dungeons (and dungeon-related quests) only. Where Sigyn had two gathering professions, Luxxa would have two crafting ones (Enchanting/Tailoring). I’d get them both to level 40, then check various indicators like their /played, how much money each made,ⁱ and which experience I found more enjoyable.

Dee’s condensed philosophy of healing

It’s worth noting that I’ve never played a priest in a group before. Well, that’s not entirely true; I did some outdoor group quests on my level 12 undead priest back in vanilla beta, but that’s it. I learnt to group heal on my shaman, under the watchful eye of our old MT warrior, Kale. Kale was good and he was fast, and I was usually his G1 healer (for… some reason). Back In Those Days, shaman didn’t have no fancy Earth Shield or Riptide; we didn’t even get Chain Heal. We were also ridiculously mana inefficient, and the net result was basically learning how to chain spam (a probably downranked) Lesser Healing Wave followed by the fine art of drinking in combat. Point being, priest healing is a walk in the fucking park compared to that shit.

I originally specced Luxxa as Holy, but I got all of about seven points into that before realising that my actual play-style was Discipline and respeccing. I like bubbles, basically. I like bubbling the tank and chillaxing for ten seconds before re-bubbling. I like bubbles up on every time. I like bubbles, bubbles, bubbles for everyone.

And so on.

Discipline is a soothing spec; it doesn’t have the frantic casting shaman healing used to. Because the tank is literally taking no damage most of the time (and the window for “tank takes damage now” is, like what, seven seconds max) it means things like huge room pulls generally don’t faze me. Actually, my Condensed Philosophy of Healing can basically be summarised as: I’m there to make the tank feel confident. When the tank feels confident — when she’s making big, neat, fast pulls with minimal downtime and no deaths — then I figure I’m doing my job.

Anyway, so if Making the Tank Feel Confident is my responsibility, I have two rules I enforce in order to ensure this occurs. They are:

1. DPS who deliberately pull aggro don’t get heals; and
2. I have zero tolerance for misogynistic bullshit.

Let me tell you about how these things work in practice.

The curse of the DPS tank

As those of you who follow me on Twitter may have had the misfortune to hear, I ended up in a group/argument the other day with a rogue who kept insisting he was a totally pro leet tank, and subsequently got shirty when I started enforcing my Rule #1. And, okay, the druid tank was a bit of a noob, but the answer to that is, like, to teach the tank, not to run off on your own — frequently out of LoS — and start aggroing mobs (protip, DPSers: As the healer, my priority is keeping the tank in LoS, then the DPS who are doing their jobs right, then you). Tanking Rogue’s basic argument was that he had some pro leet dodge score and because druid tanking is (apparently) based on dodge, he was therefore more qualified to tank than the druid was. Or something. Proof of his credentials were that he had allegedly “rogue-tanked Gruul” (though not on his level 28, I’d assume), and that he’d totally watched a YouTube video of some shaman on some other server who tanks heroic 25-mans and don’t you know shaman were a tanking class in vanillaⁱⁱ and man only ignorant noobs insist on class roles.

And, okay, it’s kinda hard to make a cogent argument when you’re trying to keep the party alive in what another member of the party referred to as the “hall of death” in Gnomer (no-one died, incidentally), but my main point was this:

I just can’t be arsed keeping your special snowflake unmelted if you can’t be arsed learning aggro management and class roles.ⁱⁱⁱ

The group is not about you, or even about me for that matter; it’s about the group. You going off being An Hero by yourself because you’ve got some alternate reality idea about how the game should run care of YouTube videos^iv does not actually take priority over the function of a group as a whole. If you’re not playing with the team, I don’t consider it a failing on my part if I let you die. And yes, this is a view that I’ve come to thanks to a few unnecessary wipes which were my fault because I did convince myself I was “awesome” enough to run after the DPS Tank and keep him alive despite the advice of the actual tank.

I’ve since disabused myself of the notion that this is a good idea. People who are performing their jobs get heals. People who are not, do not.

Thing is, it occurs to me that there’s probably a bit of confirmation bias going on here, too. I’ve been in plenty of good groups in LFG; groups where the tanking was tight and the DPS was focused and neat. It sort of occurs to me that Joe Average DPS Tank probably has not. It’s like that old demotivational poster with the line about the common element in all your failed relationships being you. Well, if all the groups you’re in in LFG suck? Yeah. There’s a common factor going on there, and protip: it’s not the healer and it’s not the tank.

The one thing that will make me (nearly) instantly drop group

It doesn’t happen very often, thankfully; we’re talking maybe once a week out of an average of three-to-five runs a night. Still, it happens. It happened the other day when I blogged about it, and it happened again last night. And ironically,^v it was crappy DPS that caused it.

The tank was complaining about DPS pulling aggro. I announced my enforcement policy of Rule #1. The hunter dropped with a “this group sux anyway”, and the rogue — I have no idea why — said, “warm my cock with ur (sic) mouth”.

“Sorry,” I said to the tank (male draenei pally, IIRC). “I’m not continuing with the rogue still in the party.” The tank was good, so I did feel bad. But policy is policy; I don’t need the aggro (I’m here for fun, not angst), and people need to learn. Besides, situations like this tend to leave me ragey and shaking, and it’s hard to concentrate on actually doing my job when I’m in that state.

“Then I’ll kick him for you,” says the tank. “I’m a girl too.”

Sadly, the vote failed; the other DPS was apparently also a cocknocker. But thank you, tank whose name I don’t recall, for trying.

In the end, I left the group. But I did wait until we were out of combat to do so. And I did feel bad about it.

Oh, and I found the women

And then, last night, I did SM Graveyard. Male draenei warrior tank with unusually grammatically-correct typing (like with capital letters and everything). We move fast and hard and clear the place in record time, then re-queue and do it again. And again.

Finally, some of the DPS have to go, so we dip back in the potluck and wait for someone new to appear.

And wait. And wait. I go back to town to train in order to get RankWatch off my back,^vi and we’re still waiting. So we start chatting; it soon becomes apparent that the tank is an oldschool player from vanilla, so we reminisce a bit about The Bad Old Days of BRD “raids” and the frustrating drop-rates of the tier-0 class sets. We also talk about what it means to’ve played the game for six years, and how I’d grouped with someone recently who talked about having started playing when he was 11 (he’s now 15).

And then the tank starts talking about training your kids to do your dailies for you as part of their chores, and refers to herself as “mommy”.

Where are the female tanks, you ask? They’re here; tanking lowbie LFGs with powerful competence, often as male avatars. You remember the Mr. Rogue Tank? When we started arguing, a DPS Pally took over leading the group; she was a woman,^vii and I gave her an exemption from Rule #1, partly just to see Mr. Rogue Tank nerdrage about it (which he did).

I raised the issue of the abundance of lowbie female tanks with Future-Mommy Tank, speculating on whether the “conventional wisdom” around the lack of female tanks in endgame was reflective of the actual situation — since there sure as hell seemed to be a lot of them in the lower levels — or was just the WoW equivalent of an urban legend.

“I think a lot of women level druids and paladins as tanks,” Future-Mommy Tank said, “then switch to healing in endgame.”

I say I think she’s probably right, and we talk about the notion of the “triple shift” and how Someone Should Totally Do a Study. We still haven’t gotten a group,^viii and eventually she mentions she has to go walk her dog and make lunch. Meanwhile, Mat’s come home so I also take my leave and go socialise with my husband for a while, cursing the vagaries of WoW that mean I can’t add my new tanking BFF to my flist and will consequently probably never see her again.

About half an hour later, I jump in the inevitable last-LFG-before-bed. It’s SMGY again, and Future-Mommy Tank is there. We terrify the DPS by pulling the entire instance, yelling madly in caps and refusing to stop for mana. The run takes about 10 minutes.

Every story should have a happy ending.

1. My initial results on this one are that — despite being in a prime environment for collecting the requisite mats — Enchanting/Tailoring are both huge money sinks. I usually start my lowbie characters out with 10g. That was good enough for Sigyn, who also earned a good few hundred more by selling leather and herbs. Luxxa, on the other hand, just sucks money; she struggled along on her 10g, which became 5g, then 1, before I finally gave up and sent her another 100g. Net recommendation: Don’t take a crafting profession unless you can bankroll it with another character. If you want the golds, go with a double-gathering combo.
2. As I think I mention in every post, I played a shaman in vanilla and I have to admit that no, I did not remember this; even though I have tanked a few instances in my day (badly, incidentally). WoW’s “philosophy of tanking” was still being worked out in vanilla, and while Mat assures me that shaman were originally intended to be tanks — hence the shields, I guess, and the original effects of Earth Shock and Rockbiter — I don’t recall that ever really being implemented on the ground, as it were.
3. And no, “aggro management” does not start at level 28 when you learn Rank 2 of Feint, Mr. Rogue Tank.
4. Which, let’s remember, are usually produced by very competent players and their BFFs who enjoy stretching the limits of the game’s mechanics. They’re like the red leather stiletto heels of WoW; something you break out on special occasions, not something you wear everyday down the virtual local shops of LFG.
5. In that way that may-or-may not, in fact, be ironic; I get a bit confused sometimes.
6. 30, yay!
7. Well, she was using “feminine” cultural references and had previously mentioned a boyfriend, so I’m extrapolating here a bit.
8. Seriously; IDK either. A tank and a healer and we can’t find three DPS? WTF, LFG!

permalink » comment? » 2,111 words posted in: Adventures, character:luxxa, girls don't play videogames, lfg

This is actually an excerpt from a longer post I wrote earlier in the month addressing some of the (crap) arguments that’ve been floating around in August’s flurry of feminism WoW posts. Sadly, that post as a whole wasn’t really doing much for me — it was pretty much just 2,500 words of rambling complaining — but there was one particular section I felt compelled to keep.

It’s about sort of about women and healing and sort of about women and progression raiding. You’ll probably get why I ditched the whole post from reading it (it’s kinda all over the place, argument-wise, which was indicative of the quality of its original source), but I still felt like it was something I needed to say, even if I needed to say it badly.

So.

Women are just naturally better at… (a.k.a. Gender Essentialism in Azeroth)

Healing. Listening. Consensus-building. I’m sure you’ve heard all these before, and more besides. You might even think they’re reasonable and fairly positive. I mean, there’s nothing bad about being considered good at something… right?

Except it’s bullshit, and it’s bullshit for three reasons.

The first one is that the things women are said to be “naturally good at” are invariably the “all responsibility and no glory” jobs. Healing isn’t easier than tanking, but it’s usually the Main Tank who’s considered the group’s leader and therefore the one responsible for its success. And yet, when the group fails? Guess how often that’s blamed on bad healing. No, seriously. Guess.

The second one is that the “naturally good at” argument is invariably pitched from a nature basis rather than a nurture one. Why aren’t there more women in progression raiding guilds? Could it be women are just “naturally” not as interested in progression raiding as men… or could it be that women are subject to societal demands men aren’t that make the time investiture for progression raiding unfeasible? Forget skill; merely having the time for progression raiding is a kind of privilege. Women just aren’t “allowed” to lock themselves in their rooms for an entire evening playing videogames — and forget doing that more than once a week — and that’s something that’s just as true (and maybe more-so) for “hardcore gamer girls” (like yours truly)ⁱ as it is for “casual” gamer women. Even if there’s no-one else physically around to remind us that  cooking the dinner/doing the housework/looking after the kids/socialising with “real people” is more important than playing some silly thing on the internet, it’s an assumption that I’d wager has been pretty heavily ingrained into most of us, even when we try and fight it. Add progression raiding into the mix, and suddenly the double shift is starting to look like a triple.

The third one is that it’s simply not true: I’m pretty confident everyone can name both a competent female Main Tank and a competent male healer. There are bad female players and bad male players. Female GLs who rule with an iron fist and their male equivalents who prefer a consensus style of leadership. “Naturally good at” is a myth.

Let’s take the healing thing, since that seems to be a common one. Fortunately for me, WoW.com recently had a post on gender influences on class choice, which included a breakdown of class preferences based on survey answers. It was:

• Men paladin, druid, shaman, warrior, death knight, priest, mage, hunter, rogue, and then warlock
• Women druid, priest, paladin, shaman, hunter, mage, warlock, death knight, warrior, and then rogue

When I first saw this, I was actually quite interested to see how close the class-choices ran. It’s notable that the top three classes for both genders are healing classes — two of which are “three role utility” (Healing/Tank/DPS). And yes, there’s a notable difference in the positions of the two DPS/Tank classes (warrior and DK) between the genders — about which I’d refer you back to my previous two points — but other than that the order is quite similar. So you can imagine my absolute bafflement when the very next sentence in the post is:

What you might notice is that men prefer the three-role hybrids, then the two-role hybrids, then the pure DPS classes. For women, the order of popularity is classes that can heal, classes that do ranged DPS, then the pure melee classes. The results of the survey would seem to imply that women and men have entirely different ways of approaching class choice

Um… wut?  You can’t make that statement; you’re not even comparing the same thing! If you actually compare the orders against the same fucking categories, rather than making shit up to confirm your initial bais, the result is:

• Men Three-role utility, two-role utility, DPS.
• Women Three-role utility, DPS, two-role utility. (With an exception for shaman.)

And:

• Men Classes that can heal, pure melee classes, classes than do ranged DPS. (With exceptions for rogues and warlocks.)
• Women Classes than can heal, classes that do ranged DPS, pure melee classes.

In other words: Hybrid/utility classes that can heal are the most popular class choice for both genders.

So enough with the “women just naturally prefer healers” rubbish, please. Everyone in WoW likes hybrid healing classes, not just women.

1. Tangent: Despite the fact that I spent vast swathes of my free time playing videogames — frequently very seriously and obsessively — and have done so since I was a child, I’m still generally not considered to be a “hardcore gamer” by most male geeks. Why? Because I don’t play “masculine” games in a “manly” way. Apparently playing a game solidly for a good week after release — even to the exclusion of eating/sleeping/spending time with your SO (as Mat will attest to I’m sure) — doesn’t qualify you as “hardcore” when that game is, say, WoW and not [insert-name-of-FPS-du-jour]. Go figure.

permalink » 6 comments » 967 words posted in: Opinions, girls don't play videogames

[Mild trigger warning for rape "jokes" and associated bullshit tropes.]

So, what with August kinda being unofficial “Women in WoW” month, I had one of those “I’m a feminist, hear me roar!” posts lined up. Then I bought myself a lot of heirlooms and rolled myself a priest,ⁱ so was going to write a post about My Experiences As a Lowbie Priest With LFG (or, Don’t Put Psychic Scream Right Next To Fade).

Then I got a shitty group — actually, the same shitty group twice in a row — in Deadmines and figured I’d combine the two. I mean, it’s not that they were bad players. The tank tanked and the DPS were neat. It’s just, well…

The opening hint of badness came when (and I’m bummed I didn’t take a screenshot of this), I zone into the dungeon and get, “Hello beautiful. You’ve just in time for VC.” I find it hard to describe just how viscerally angry this comment made me; let’s just say I was actually physically shaking. But it’s not like I’ve never deal with boorish chauvinists before, so I just shut my mouth and heal (well, bubble) my way to an easy loot bag.

We finish up, I port out, grab some more juiceⁱⁱ and jump back in. Some familiar names pop up.

I hate Deadmines — well, I hate all the vanilla dungeons, but that’s neither here nor there — but I figure the group doesn’t totally suck, and everything is going well up until we pull the first boss. That’s when the rape jokes pop out. Nothing egregious, just the usual bullshit.

“Gang rape,” says the warrior.

“He likes it,” replies the noobadin, while the warrior and the tank laugh.

And I just… I’ve had a long day at work, you know? It wasn’t bad, but it was long, and I just wanna come home and chillax while the hubby is at uni by killing some internet dragons (well, bubble some tanks while the hunters behind me kill some internet dragons). I don’t want to deal with the lurking spectres of rape culture and the patriarchy. I don’t want to educate anyone about why perpetuating the Asking For It line is just a really shitty thing to do under any circumstance, even (especially) as a “joke”, even (especially) when the target is male. And I really, really don’t want to be the only one in the group who’s prepared to say that That Shit Ain’t On, and thus face the inevitable “frigid bitch” backlash.

So I drop group. Right there in the middle of the boss fight.

You know that whole stereotype about women playing healers? Yeah, well, guess what; most women aren’t terribly enthused about rape “jokes”, either. Might be something to think about for next time, boys.

/ignore

1. And don’t get me started on the whole “having MC enchants on your level 10 weapon” thing.
2. I go through that stuff so fast. Don’t talk to me about efficiency! I played a Resto Shaman in MC; let me tell you about how a 40-man healing rotation works at some stage.

permalink » 7 comments » 513 words posted in: Adventures, character:luxxa, girls don't play videogames, lfg

For someone who’s had a poisonous loathing for instances since vanilla, I really, really like the LFG tool. I hadn’t had a crack at it in a while, but the other weekend it occurred to me that I might like to try and start assembling some Heirloom sets for Cataclysm, specifically for my planned future feral druid and warlock. So, being me, I made a list of gear that I’d need. I ended up breaking it down into three segments based on getting the maximum amount of “slot coverage” in the minimum amount of time, even when some of that gear would be non-ideal for levelling; “priority 1 PvE gear”, “good enough PvP gear” and “priority 2 PvE gear”.

As it turned out, I’d need 255 badges for the first group, about 500 Stone Keeper’s Shards for the second, and an addition 145 badges for the final group, which contained the PvE equivalent pieces for the PvP equipment bought in group 2 (and was thus not necessary, but slightly more “ideal”… though I doreally quite like BGs).

Assuming a conservative average of about 5 badges per run, I would need to run about 51 instances to buy all the equipment in group one. Or — allowing for a 15 minute queue plus a thirty minute run — about 40 hours worth of instancing.

Okay. That’s the maths.

So for the last week or so, I’ve been diligently logging on and queuing up, and have managed to accrue about 100 badges (~40%) as of this writing. So far, so good. In fact, most of the groups have been pretty good. It’s been a couple of months since I was last hitting LFG hard, and the group dynamics have changed noticeably since then — a lot more people in the 5.5k+ GS range, a lot less attempts at even the easiest achievements — but all in all things have been running pretty smoothly.

And then there was last night. Oh, last night. Let me tell you about the runs I had.

Run #1: Violet Hold

“Oh good,” I foolishly think. “VH. Nice, easy badges.”

In retrospect, the first bad sign was zoning straight into the middle of a fight.ⁱ It was only the first or second portal, though in retrospect I wonder exactly how long the previous DPSer hung around before I got tapped.

The tank is warrior, and stupendously over-geared (~5.8k GS). However, it soon becomes apparent that he’s slow as fuck. Leik woah. And VH is not exactly one of those instances that is cool with y’all sitting around twiddling thumbs in between pulls, you know? So portals are opening up and we’re all standing there ready, except the tank is off on the other side of the room and hasn’t moved since the last pull. The mobs spawn and I shift to Frost, pop Icebound Fortitude and pick them up with a Death and Decay rather than have them run loose, then shift back to Unholy when the tank finally decides to show up a few seconds later.

This goes on for a while, until we manage to reach the first boss. That ethereal guy spawns, and I start getting a bad feeling when the tank picks him up on the floor and doesn’t move. Coincidentally, I’d read up on the strat for the boss the other day when as part of my prep for psyching myself up for tanking, so am sadly not surprised in the least when we wipe.

Our mage drops group and we pick up a boomkin in his stead. Round two is just as sloppy as round one and we wipe in the exact same placefor the exact same reason. Boomkin gets the shits and drops.

“I don’t understand what’s going wrong,” says the tank.

“You can’t tank this guy on the floor. You have to kite him around the balcony,” I say.

“That’s not what’s killing me.”

“Then what is?”

“I don’t get it. He’s never hit for more than 1k before.”

“Dude. Kite. Around. The balcony. You have to keep him away from the orb things.”

“…”

What a fucking waste of time. Drop group.

Run #2: Pit of Saron

Warrior tank, plus an over-geared healadin who is obviously running his ele shaman guildmate through for the first time. Pet hate #1: People who do the heroic version of an instance before running the non-heroic version. Anyway.

I zone in just before we pull the second boss, which is probably not the greatest sign. Again, the tank is fucking slow, but she generally holds aggro and I’m prepared to assume she’s just a bit new. That’s cool, we all were once, and people being new doesn’t bug me.

Anyway, we kill Ick and start on the mob packs on the hill. We end up wiping once for reasons I don’t recall, but nonetheless eventually get to the tunnel. The tank runs in, I follow, and immediately get a bad feeling when the shaman drops totems at the tunnel entrance.

Pet hate #2: People who don’t ask in advance how an encounter should go when they’ve never done it before. For godssakes, if you’re worried about people thinking you’re a noob, at least read up on the strat at WoWWiki on your second monitor or something.

Needless to say, we wipe on the tunnel’s middle platform. Everyone but me, the pally and the shaman drop group.

“The tank was fucking useless,” announces the pally.

I re-queue us, and while we wait for a new tank I explain the tunnel to the shaman.

Our new tank turns out to be an over-geared DK who is thrilled at the prospect of easy Frost badges. I watch her closely to pick up tips for my soon-to-be-honest-I’m-getting-right-on-that tanking career; it helps that she tends to yell out her spells as she uses them. We make it through the tunnel and down the last boss with no further issues. Phew.

Run #3: Oculus

When I zone in, the over-geared tankadin and the rogue are in the middle of a conversation, so I figure I’m the replacement for the usual Oculus drop. No worries. The healer is an over-geared druid from Cairne whose name is familiar for some reason; we’ll hear more from him later.

Again, the tank is fucking useless. We clear the first pack when he suddenly declares he needs to repair and zones back to Dal to do so. Meanwhile, patrols are bearing down on us so I switch to Frost and my Scrubtank setⁱⁱ just in case things go bad. Thankfully, they don’t, and a few minutes later the tank returns. We pull a few packs and it becomes painfully apparent that he just can’t fucking hold aggro worth a damn; I get twitchy when I see loose mobs wailing on the healer, and end up deploying my mouseover Death Grip macro a few times just to drag mobs back to melee range. I know this is kinda bad of me, but… loose mobs give me hives, man. Seriously, get the fuck back in the AoE. And between Death Strike, IBF/Anti-Magic Shell and Rune Tap I figure can deal with a single trash elite for a few hits.ⁱⁱⁱ

Anyway, we’re about half-way down the first corridor when the tank announces he’s wanted on vent. He keeps pulling, so I figure it’s okay, until about a pull and a half later when suddenly there are mobs fucking all over the place and the tank isn’t moving.

Frost. Death and Decay. You know how this goes.

We kill the pack and the tank returns. “Lol,” he says. “I was alt-tabbed out of WoW.”

“I would get the retard Oculus group, wouldn’t I?” bitches the healer.

/facepalm

Eventually, we start killing the constructs around the first ring, except the tank is still losing aggro to the casters — often multiple mobs — on every pull. “You might wanna, like, drop a Consecration or something,” says the druid at one point.

“Lol,” says the tank. “Forgot to turn on Righteous Fury.”

Palm. Face. Again.

Surprisingly, we actually manage to finish the instance with no wipes. I remember how to actually use my drake about halfway through the last boss (the debuff stacks weren’t showing for some reason, and I always forget that third button is channelled), which just goes to show I’m not Captain Perfect PUGger either, but there you go.

I don’t get a drake mount, but I do get some extra badges. Ultimately, this turns out to be the least-worst run of the night.

Run #4: Halls of Reflection

Paladin tank, priest healer. At 5.1k GS I am the most under-geared player there. We clear through to the first boss; it’s smooth and perfect. No wipes, no deaths, nothing.

We down the boss, distribute loot… then half the group suddenly drops.

Like… why? We were doing great! I don’t get it; it’s not like the droppers were even from the same server.

I zone out before the second wave can wipe the floor with my broken heart.

Run #5: Ahn’kahet

We down the first pack fine and make it to the stairs. Suddenly, everything goes to shit; we’ve got adds coming in from behind andthe sides. Not just one pack but two or three. I’m the last one down due to Mad Keen Death Strike Skillz, but it’s still not enough against five trash mobs, and when my diseases run out it’s the caster that gets me in the end.

“Nice pull, asshole,” says the tank, before dropping group. I have no fucking clue who he’s even talking to. I… don’t think it was me.

Was it me? No, surely not. I only have, like, two buttons in instances; 1 is “assist tank” and 2 is “DPS rotation”. My ghoul is on passive (his attack is the second thing in my rotation sequence). The only way I could pull extra mobs would be with bad AoE from Death and Decay or maybe Pestilence, but if we were that close they would’ve pulled anyway.

So I don’t think it was me.

Still. Nice pull, asshole.

As the last one down I’m also the last one out of the instance. Dejected, I hearth back to Dal and decide it’s time for bed.

After all, tomorrow is another day.

1. I like how LFG now sends you straight to where the group is rather than the start of the instance; nice ‘n’ lazy.
2. It’s “uncrittable”, but most of that is made up of resilience rather than defense, so it’s not really a Heroic tanking set.
3. Because my DG macro works on mouseover, I don’t shift my melee target away from the tank’s, which means the DG’d mob usually returns to the tank on the next AoE taunt.

permalink » 2 comments » 1,794 words posted in: Adventures, 5-mans, character:severin, lfg

Hey, how about instead of spewing bile and alienating commentors, I post about something positive?

Well, first off, that pic of Ulfrun is coming along… slowly. It’s that horrible decision between “do I work on art?” or “do I play WoW?” Damn you, #firstworldproblems!

Anyway, initial monochrome is done. Still pretty rough at this stage; I’ve got two more layers of “underpainting” before the final render pass, so there’s probably a good… uh, you know. I honestly have no idea how long it takes me to paint these things. I kinda lose track. Anyway, another couple of sessions at least. I’ll have to see if I can reliably run PhotoShop while WoW is open; that way I can try painting in between the LFG tool popping.

Pew Pew: Monochrome

In other tedious news, I got Sigyn to level 40, making her now officially my fourth highest-level character ever. I’ve been jumping her around zones a bit, which hurts considering what an obsessive completist I am when it comes to questing. Not finishing every quest in a zone before moving on makes me… twitchy.

Nonetheless, I’ve decided getting Sig to 60 is more important than doing all of vanilla (Severin has already done that, for starters).

I also caved and bought her some additional Heirlooms;ⁱ chest and shoulders. The models make me so nostalgic for the days of vanilla!

Anyway, I was kinda down on Paladin for a while — and spending most of that in Westfall probably didn’t helpⁱⁱ — but the class got a lot more fun suddenly after about level 20. My terrible fear of social rejection and making an idiot of myself in publicⁱⁱⁱ has kept me away from the LFG tool, though I’ve been kinda inching closer and closer towards it lately, especially now that I’ve picked up Holy Shock. I’ll have to go read some “how to be less shit at Healadin” guides or something while I’m at it; Theorycrafting isn’t exactly my forté, though I do generally try not to be totally awful at my class…

Big bad level 40.

It probably says a lot about me as a person that my Paladin — who’s never done anything except solo, plus the odd BG — is specced Holy.

In related news, a truly awful experience with a Tankadin today has made me consider wanting to start to learn to tank. On… my DK, I guess. Can those guys still tank? I’m never sure. Anyway, I have absolutely no clue as to how I’d go about learning to do that. I don’t really want to inflict Bad Tanking on people in LFG…

Except, like, there was that time in VH when the tank DC’d. And I kinda just… picked up where she left off. And no-one (well, except the healer) noticed until like four pulls later. We finished the instance pretty easily, so go me (and the healer), particularly considering I have no tanking spec and no tanking gear. It was kinda fun. Also: Much, much faster LFG. Always a plus.

Well, I now — thanks to two blue drops — have a whopping 431 def. Er… DK tanks need def, right?

Man, I have no fucking clue.

Finally:

Vroom! Vroom!

Woo-fucking-hoo!

I have been saving up for this thing for ages. They’re about 20k on my server, and I am absolutely rubbish at earning gold. I hit about that after completing Seeker on Severin… then blew about 3k of it in one hit buying crappy crafted ilvl 200 epics so I could solo the three group quests I needed in Icecrown to get Loremaster. I’ve been trying to get that 3k back pretty much since then, but I finally found a Chopper for about 16k the other day, so pounced.

I’m now officially poor again, but damn. Motorcycle!

I am such a rad unit.

1. I swear I’ve, like, lost some Heirlooms at some point. IDK either, hey.
2. It’s come to my attention that Westfall is the fucking worst zone in the whole of vanilla WoW. True story.
3. You’d never’ve guessed, right?

permalink » 4 comments » 688 words posted in: Adventures, Art, character:severin, character:sigyn, character:ulfrun, levelling, levelling:ding

So the other day I figured I’d try and find a guild for Cataclysm. When Google was not helpful for this task, I bit the bullet and turned to the Mok’Nathal realm forums. I mean… how bad could that be?

There's no way this could possibly go wrong... right?

Lesigh.

So thank you, Frostling of <Aggressive Behaviour>, for reminding me why I spend the majority of my time in this game playing solo.

Back to the drawing board.

permalink » 2 comments » 86 words posted in: Lamentation, forum whoring, guilds

When Blizzard released the “Ghosts of the Past” trailer for StarCraft II, my friend Matt-Matt turned to me and said, “Since when did Kerrigan look like a Final Fantasy character?”

I’m starting to think Blizzard has a problem with women.

I know, right? Only the other week I was writing a post about how they’re actually pretty good with women — by video game standards, anyway — but it’s starting to occur to me that the sample size I’ve traditionally based that assessment on (vanilla WoW) was pretty small, and that maybe it’s time to broaden my scope.

If you’d asked me last year to name my absolute favourite female videogame character, I would’ve said Sarah Kerrigan. I mean, just look at her:

What a fucking badass. She’s not “pretty” in any conventional sense of the word, and by the end of Brood Warshe’s managed to take over an entire sector of space while all the male characters are busy underestimating her because she’s a woman. Also, she’s voiced by Glynnis Talken Campbell, whom you may also recall as the voice of Julie Winters in the awesome cartoon adaptation of The Maxx.ⁱ Whether or not Kerrigan represents a feminist template for women in videogames probably depends on who you ask — I’ve heard convincing arguments both ways — but the flaws in her plotline do not actually undermine the fact that, a) she’s the player character in an RTS game (not a genre traditionally thought to be of interest to women),ⁱⁱ and b) she essentially “wins” Brood War. The Zerg are the faction left standing at the end of that game, a victory which is all down to Kerrigan.

In this game, you have to take your victories where you can get them.

Kerrigan’s tiny head portraits in SCI do not feel “male gaze-y” — her human form in particular is even arguably sort of, uh, “homely” in that it doesn’t conform to the bland mainstream female beauty standard — which is why the concept art that’s come out of her for SCII is particularly disappointing. There’s even a page in the CE artbook devoted to her “high heels” and, seriously guys, that shit was fucking stupid in Beowulf and it’s not actually any less fucking stupid here.

And as for her non-infested appearance?

It’s almost like Blizzard popped out one of those awful “how to draw fantasy and comic book women” (ahem) tutorials and uses it as a basis to statistically calculate the perfect damsel-in-distress-cum-love-interest. With her soft, infantilized face it’s evident from the first moment she appears on screen that Kerrigan is the story’s plot point. And the opening in-game cutscene in Wings of Liberty makes it painfully apparent that her story is no longer her own, but rather regaled to simply providing the “tragic” motivational backstory in the life of a man.ⁱⁱⁱ Her infestation is no longer representative of her own (quite literal) reclamation of agency, but rather Raynor’s failure as a “hero”.

Oh Kerrigan. What have they done to you?

It’s not just her. Wings of Libert ymight as well come with a giant warning sticker that reads, “WOMEN: THIS GAME IS NOT FOR YOU”. Because it isn’t, and it’s not just because of Cigar Guy’s (whose name escapes me and, honestly, I don’t care enough about to look up) propensity for awful, misogynistic dialogue. There are no female characters in this game who live outside of one of the narrow and tedious “supporting role” tropes assigned to women. There’s Naïve Plucky Reporter Girl, Mothering Love Interest “Nurse” Type^iv, Damsel in Distress and Morally Dubious Sexy Assassin Lady.^v And dear gods how fucking sick am I of seeing these three archetypes over and over and over and fucking over and I thought Blizzard was fucking better than that by now.

Seriously. Why is Swann not female? Or Matt? Or that nerd guy with the Ghostbusters name? Or the general dude? Or the emperor’s son? Or, hell, Cigar Guy?

Oh, wait. Because “grizzled mechanic”, “steadfast second-in-command”, “science nerd”, “battle-scarred leader”, “ambitious heir to the throne” and “chauvinist army guy” aren’t roles woman are allowed to have. I forgot we have to live in our boxes of “annoying little sister”, “nagging mother”, “fawning love interest” and “slut”.

How silly of me.

So no, I did not like Wings of Liberty; I think it’s a fucking awful game. Not because of the mechanics or the gameplay or the interface or the graphics (which are all honestly fantastic) or the technical execution of the cutscenes (which, again, is fantastic; the bar-fight-scene, for all its laughable machismo and cringe-worthy dialogue, deserves some kind of award; just watch it with the sound off). No, Wings of Liberty is fucking awful because — after six years of WoW — it feels like such a huge ideological step backwards for Blizzard as a game company. Something which is especially notable coming hot on the heels of tales of Activision’s attitude towards female protagonists.

Of course, I’m prepared to accept the fact that I never really liked the terran campaigns, and there are definitely some promising seeds (read: Selendis, more of her pls) for the next two releases. So c’mon, Blizzard. Surprise me.

But if Kerrigan isn’t the main character in Heart of the Swarm?

Yeah. That.

1. And seriously, if you do not? You should go check it out. I cannot even begin to describe just how much I used to identify with Sarah — overweight, socially awkward, glasses-wearing, creative freak that she is — when I first saw that show; something that was both a total eye-opener and completely New and Different for me when it came to a TV series/comic book.
2. Although PopCap’s Plants vs. Zombies puts lie to that one.
3. We have a term for that, incidentally: Refrigeration.
4. Who, you’ll note, looks suspiciously like she’s just walked out of a nail salon for someone who’d previously been doing it tough on a colony world. Kerrigan has the exact same nails in her final cutscene, though in that circumstance I can almost buy them being remnants of her infested claws. And yes, I notice this shit. The fact that you don’t, oh anonymous male reader, is called privilege.
5. Oh, and one token “background engineer” who can be occasionally seen hanging around in the cantina. Seriously, background engineer chick; you are my SCII hero.

permalink » 18 comments » 1,059 words posted in: Lamentation, girls don't play videogames, npc:kerrigan, starcraft, starcraft:wings of liberty

Once upon a time, I used to run a guild. It was called Elavion.ⁱ

I created it back before the release of vanilla, figuring that if I was ever going to get something successful off the ground, that was the time. So I whipped up a website and advertised in a few places, and was incredibly fucking surprised when applications began to trickle in. We met each other in the Open Beta and I have very strong memories of running around in Durotar with the Guild Charter trying to get everyone’s signatures in Release. Anyone who still remembers what the servers were like in the first few weeks after release will know why I mentally associate this time with the Das Racist song “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell”.

It was great fun.

Elavion was built on the founding principle that you could teach people how to play, but not how not to be asshats; it was a safe(-ish) space before I even knew what the phrase meant. I enforced the founding principle by making potential members go through a formal application process that involved writing relatively lengthy descriptions of a player’s history and what, in particular, attracted them to Elavion.ⁱⁱ The net result of this process was that we tended to attract, well, the sorts of people who would be prepared to write lengthy descriptions of their player history and who could articulate exactly why they wanted to join Elavion. In other words, mature, thoughtful, 30-something professionals.

The thing that really made Elavion great were the people; no question.

We were never a huge guild and we didn’t raid; remembering that back in those days you needed a player-base of about 60 people to do so. Naturally, it got to a point where some of our members wanted to experience endgame, so we lost a few of our level 60s to one of the server’s big raiding guilds.ⁱⁱⁱ One of them was a guy called Kale, our resident rocket scientist.^iv Kale played a mage in Raiding Guild Whose Name I Don’t Remember, where he managed to run afoul of the Two Hats Rule.

Back In The Old Days, you had two Big Bads — Onyxia and Ragnaros — and one-and-a-bit tiers of endgame gear. Tier 1 used to drop in Molten Core, with one piece of Tier 2 (I think it was the pants) dropping off Ragnaros. But Onyxia? She dropped the Tier 2 hat.

RGWNIDR had some kind of DKP system, and Kale’s mage patiently used it to gather up his Tier 1 set from Molten Core, including his Tier 1 helm. Then, one day, Onyxia dropped the Tier 2 mage helm, and Kale realised he had enough DKP to get it. So he bid…

… and was promptly informed by the raid leader about the until-then-unknown Two Hats Rule — i.e. you couldn’t get your Tier 2 helm if you already had your Tier 1 — who gave the Tier 2 mage helm to another mage instead. One who not-so-coincidentally happened to be the raid leader’s friend.

To say that Kale was not happy with this turn of events would be putting it mildly, and it was basically the formative event for what would eventually become known as Sephira. See, a GL of Elavion I basically had this problem; I had a bunch of really awesome, dedicated, highly-skilled players who wanted to raid… and no way for me to get a raid started for them short of essentially removing the entry requirements for the guild. Which of course was a catch-22, since the whole reason we had a guild of awesome, dedicated, highly-skilled players was because we had entry requirements.

Except it occurred to me that we couldn’t've been the only people who had this problem. So what about, instead of trying to make one huge raiding guild, we started a raiding alliance (or raiding horde, as it were)? So people from the small, “casual” guilds could join up and we’d raid together, but they wouldn’t have to lose their original guild identities.

Of course, to do this, we’d need a raid leader. I wasn’t going to be doing it, firstly because I didn’t want to and secondly because of a separation-of-powers thing; we’d have enough trouble trying to convince people Elavion and Sephira were separate as it was, without having the GL and RL being the same person. Fortunately for me, I had Kale. Kale who’d re-rolled not just a warrior — to be the MT in a raid — but also a rogue — so he could farm the materials to craft the gear he needed to be the MT in a raid.^v

So Kale became the new raid leader for Sephira.

We were almost there, the one thing we were missing was a DKP system. I mean, we could have adopted someone else’s, I guess, but one of the founding principles of Sephira was No Two Hats. That is, all rules and system had to be, a) transparent, and b) applied equally to everyone. Also, Elavion was filled with mathematicians and theorycrafters. Surely we could come up with something better?

Kale did; it was called PieDKP and was a zero sum variant working off two pools of points (one for class-only gear, one for everything else). It was posted to the forums and discussed and tweaked for weeks before we signed it off and actually started using it.

Finally, we had everything; a pool of people, a raid leader and a DKP system. We set about gearing and keying people, and finally called our first Onyxia run.

Where things go from here is less important. It’s somewhat important that we tore up endgame content, and continued to do so through ZG and Kara (though got a bit stuck on BWL, I’ll admit). It’s important that the system worked, and it’s really important that it was the people who made it work.

Obviously, it didn’t work forever. I quit Sephira shortly after I started working, then handed over the reins to Elavion a little after that. Internal tensions and burn-out caused a slow death over the next year or so. It happens.

That was circa 2006, and the point of this long-winded story is basically to describe why I’ve been unguilded since then, even when I was technically in a guild (Ulfrun spent some time as a lurker in Nazgul, but it was never really “my guild”). When I re-rolled Alliance on Mok’Nathal, I had no real intention of joining another guild, though eventually ended up in Credit Union after talking with some guy on the lift in Zangamarsh once.^vi

Still, it wasn’t the same. Elavion spoilt me; Pesti and Kale and Farenti and Ato and Stillgar and all the old crew, you guys have ruined guilding for me. It’s just not the same nowadays; other people are idiots and asshats.

Case in point: Standing around in Dal on Sunday I was invited to join a new guild. I figured, hell. Why not. What could go wrong? So I join up, there’s a bit of discussion going on. Turns out the GL is 14 (!), but the average age of the other members is in the mid-twenties to forties, so I figure this could be okay. We have a chat about fantasy novels and how Twilight would’ve been better if Edward and Jacob ran off together.

And then — less than four hours after joining — the conversation turns to how the other members would totally let Megan Fox eat them. Because, leik, she so hawt gais OMG I hit that ifunoewhaddeyemeen. Also, her thinking she’s too good to be in the next Transformers is so gay dontchaknow, and that “pubic hair” (actual quote) they’re replacing her with isn’t nearly hot enough.

Protip, men reading this: This sort of discussion? Is like a giant sign to any women listening saying “THIS PLACE IS NOT FOR YOU”. What are our options? Try and be “more man than the men” and enthusiastically leap into the misogyny? Try and call people on it and be dubbed the frigid feminazi bitch? Or — like I did — sit quietly in the resigned knowledge that you’ve found yet another space that is unwelcoming.

People wonder why people like me play the game guildless and PUGed. Well, now you know. I know that makes the experience “non-optimal” or whatever, but honestly? I’d rather that than feel forced to make nice with assholes and idiots. I have the Really Real World for that; I don’t need it to follow me into Azeroth.

The point of this — and there is one, and I am getting to it — is to explain why I feel so leery about the new guild experience system. I was so-so on it when it was announced, mostly because I’d been under the impression that the benefits conveyed by guild membership would only really be useful to large raiding guilds. Now that we’ve actually seen the guild experience interface, it’s fairly evident that’s not actually the case; the new rewards system is actively disadvantageous to the unguilded, even for solo activities such as crafting. Hell, it’s worse than that; it’s disadvantageous to anyone who’s not a member of a huge, “top-tier” guild with maxed out levels. I mean, why would people join the Elavions and the Credit Unions of Azeroth when they can’t offer the utility — hard, actual numerical utility, not just “more bank tabs” — of the en masse, accept everyone guilds?

Because, honestly? This whole guild experience system? Like RealID, it’s starting to feel like yet another feature I’m going to be excluded from on account of not being a straight white 15-year-old cis-boy.

So… anyone wanna start a guild?

1. For the record, I’m pretty sure it still exists as a name on the Proudmoore server, though all the original crew have long since left.
2. I think originally apps went to the forums for discussion by existing members, but in v2.0 of the guild site I wrote a proper bespoke web interface for the process. It was awesome; you can still get an idea of how it worked thanks the the magic of the Wayback Machine.
3. Ironically, I don’t remember its name. It was the one that wasn’t Nazgul.
4. Actually, I think he designed robots for use in space, but anyway…
5. Back In The Day, “preparing to raid” generally took up more time than the actual raid itself.
6. Matt-Matt is now the GL of CU, believe it or not.

permalink » 18 comments » 1,754 words posted in: Lamentation, back in my day we, girls don't play videogames, guilds, nostalgia

Hello, Blizzard.

Look at your fanboys, now back to me, now back at your fanboys, now back to me.

Sadly, they aren’t me, but if you stopped using tired misogynistic tropes and switched to respecting women as a legitimate audience, they could be me.

Look down, back up, where are you? You’re in a beta test with the player your players could be.

What’s in your hand, back at me. I have it, it’s the Collector’s Edition of every game you’ve produced in the last six years.

Look again, the CEs are now tie-in merchandise.

Anything is possible when your games smell like respect for women and not casual misogyny.

I’m on a horse.

permalink » 7 comments » 114 words posted in: Lulz, girls don't play videogames, meme