I was going to write a post about why healing really is fun now, and how you shouldn’t despair, just wait to get more gear and better groups, why pugs aren’t always horrible… then I decided that everyone else wrote about that already. Instead, here’s a couple of likes and dislikes from my first month of Cataclysm.

Favorite spell: Lifebloom
I’m a Wrath druid, so until a month ago, I only used Lifebloom with Clearcasting for the mana regen. I fully expected to hate the spell, because keeping 3 stacks up on a tank sounded like a pain in the ass. I couldn’t have been more wrong: I love it! The huge bloom is a (literal) life-saver when the tank gets knocked out of range.

Least favorite spell: Regrowth
Get out of here, mana drain with a shitty HoT. If the patch notes are really saying what people believe they’re saying about Empowered Touch, Regrowth will lose its only use: a heal that allows controlled blooms.

Favorite instance(s): Throne of the Tides and Deadmines
Throne of the Tides is so. so. pretty. I love the look of Vashj’ir, even though the underwater mechanics make me cry. While I don’t particularly like the bosses in Throne of the Tides, the graphics more than make up for that.

In contrast, Deadmines is pure fun (especially since Blizzard spared us the long corpse run!). The encounters are well-designed and I absolutely love the “dodge the lines of deadly lightning” game. It surprised me a lot, since I used to suck at stuff like Halion’s beams… turns out, doing it while not having to focus on healing is great!
(Bonus: The first time we went there my guildies bet that I was going to die. I did it perfectly on the first try. They failed. Hah!)

Least favorite instance(s): Grim Batol and Blackrock Caverns
I hate Blackrock Mountain. I’ve always hated Blackrock Mountain. I learned the corpse run pretty fast and I haven’t fallen in the lava yet, but the color scheme is annoying, Karsh is a bitch to do and Beauty is not fun in a group with little to no CC. (They’re taking away some puppies though!)

Grim Batol is just plain depressing, the bosses are nigh-impossible with a bad (or even mediocre) group, and the first few times I wiped there for ages, even with the guild. I did have good experiences lately (a pug that cleared it in less than an hour!), but I’ll never like the place.

Favorite quest (Cataclysm): Saving baby squirrels and deer! (Hyjal)
I’m a sucker for cute things. Even when the cute things are trying their best to run away from me.

Favorite quest (old world): The baby raptor quest line (Stranglethorn).
Still a sucker for the cute. I will be a very angry druid if we don’t get to hear the end of the raptor story.

Least favorite quest(s): The naga battlemaiden quest line (Vashj’ir).
The quests themselves were interesting, the zone looks amazing, but oh my God trying to navigate the levels in that temple. If I have to look for a quest starting point for 15 minutes I get very, very annoyed.

Best racial ever: Shadowmeld
I ninja pull. A lot. Shadowmeld has saved me and my group from death countless times. I really, really miss it when I play my draenei…

Least favorite raid boss: Al’Akir
I haven’t started raiding (hence the lack of favorite boss), but I read about Al’Akir and I just know it’s going to be a nightmare. In Wrath I mostly managed to stay out of Valithria’s portals, but it seems like this won’t be an option now. I might be dumb or out of practice, but navigating in 3D is not my thing. If I couldn’t hit a couple of floaty clouds, dodging them while trying to heal can’t be good.

Least favorite gearing option: trinkets and wrists
Why in the world are there tons of drops for all slots except wrists? It’s not even a druid problem, everyone is complaining about this.
And why did you put an amazing trinket at the end of a rep grind that doesn’t come with a tabard? I’m sorry, Baradin’s Wardens, but I can’t. Dailies are my least favorite part of WoW and I’d rather do Al’Akir until my eyes bleed rather than going to Tol Barad.

I wasn’t excited for Cataclysm. I was really (really) enjoying my raiding break after 6 months of feeling I had to make every raid (due to a lack of healers in the guild). I was really (really) enjoying leveling my hunter in the new world and taking it easy. I was even reading quest text! That hadn’t happened since my first char killed her first 10 kobolds! (Sorry Gerald.)

But Blizzard doesn’t care about my excitement or lack thereof, so launch day came and went, with its login server instability and giddiness in the guild. I’ve been panicking about the guild for months (too many healers, not enough tanks, a pregnancy – not mine -, not knowing who is coming back and in what roles, hoping some people don’t come back at all) and I kept doing it. But after disagreeing with Kurn about guild prepardeness, I did start making some plans, scaled to our 10-man pretty casual level (no spreadsheets :P).

One of the points is that the first raid is scheduled for sometime in January. I’m a slow leveler and it’s somewhat of a running joke in the guild, with people urging me on whenever I’m playing a new alt. This time, I decided to hell with it all. I had enough time until January to get to 85, I was expecting it to be slow, and I wanted to enjoy the ride. So I took it easy, I cleared zones even when I was supposed to start new ones, I barely dungeoned and… I still managed to ding 85 Sunday night. The only concession I made was moving to Twilight Highlands before I finished Uldum, since it was getting late and I had set a goal to be 85 before the new week.

And now it’s time to panic again. After basically running with 2 healers in Wrath, now we have a ton. Inactive and social members came back and they all want to heal… which meant I boomkined a lot. The good part is that the new eclipse is really, really cool. My damage is still shit (my boomkin-main boyfriend facepalmed when he saw my numbers), but I am finally enjoying the spec. The bad part is that I am a healer and the future doesn’t look bright.

On the short term, I have to relearn healing and it looks scary as hell. I started playing my druid mid-Wrath, so I never ever used Lifebloom. I’ll probably need to make a big flashing Power Aura to remind me it exists. I don’t yet understand how all the spells work together. I feel my heals are horribly underpowered. And, since we only have 2-3 tanks in the guild (to 4-5 healers), it means I’ll get to pug a lot. I’m excited at getting to heal again, but judging by the tanks I’ve seen so far… it probably won’t be very fun. (Then again, I can’t wait to troll some idiots again! It gets my blood boiling when someone thinks s/he can boss me around and I love bitching back.) Right now, the one thing that makes me hopeful is the amazing blogosphere. There are so many good druid bloggers who can show me the light, thank Elune!

On the long term, we’ve got some raid balancing to think about. While I don’t hate moonkin anymore, DPS is not what I do, but with the amount of people wanting to heal this expansion… I might have to do it more than usual. We’ll see when we get there, but I really hope some of the would-be raiders will realize they don’t have enough time to dedicate to it… then we can split the healers between main and alt runs and everyone will be happy!

Jen is not a very happy druid at the moment and the most annoying thing is that I can’t put my finger on the reason. But, since it’s Monday and I really, really don’t feel like working, I will try the solution that always works to cheer me up: planning gear upgrades! While she was a baby druid I had immense fun thinking of her future level 80 gear, and I hope this will work again for level 85. First thing: buy that goddamn Therazane rep and stop being stupid about my reps!

P.S. Blizzard, I am not Very Manly!

Looks like it takes something bad to get me writing. We’ve been on a raiding break for a while, I had an amazing time leveling an alt and not feeling pressured to raid, everything’s been quiet. I wasn’t even excited about Cataclysm, I was loving the changed world so much I didn’t want to go back to “serious” leveling. But it’s here and guildies’ excitement got to me too.

One of the best parts of Cataclysm was knowing that our collective efforts will make a difference. We’re a small guild and most of us are friends, so it’s not like I need a carrot to make them stick around, but I was looking forward to getting achievements together and leveling the guild. Seeing achievements pop up in guild chat, seeing our shammy get to 85, seeing our guild get to level 2 (then back to 1, then back to 2) felt so nice. It was us! Our guild was getting better! We could get to 85 and run heroics and raids and kill critters and get our guild leveled even faster!

Or not. Blizzard decided that XP from achievements was imbalanced, so they removed it completely. Er, what?

I was a bit confused on the subject until recently, so this is how it used to work:
* You did your thing, doing quests or dungeons, and the guild gained XP up to a cap. The cap is very low, making the pre-Cataclysm complaints (OMFG you’re killing small guilds!!!) worthless. We had maybe 5 people active on the first night, and around 10 on the second, and we hit the cap in no time.
* You gained guild achievements (e.g. doing heroics or raids in a guild group) and the guild earned extra XP, beyond the cap. This was removed.

The result? All guilds that have some active players will level to 25 on the same day, due to the “gated” progress. The argument, I think, is that it’s making it fair for small guilds, because the big ones would otherwise ding 25 in a few days.

So what? I’m in a small guild. We’re here because we want to be here. I don’t give a flying fuck if some 25-man guild gets the perks before us. Working together for our smaller goals felt amazing and Blizzard took it away. I’m not a whiner and I generally agree with Blizzard’s reasoning, but I simply can’t understand this one. Wasn’t it easier to just make the achievement gives significantly less XP? Even that small amount would still be an incentive.

If I knew I was contributing to the guild, I would gladly go clear Mount Hyjal or Scarlet Monastery. If the achievements are now just shiny numbers on a list, I am not even going to bother. I have all the personal achievements I wanted; if I don’t have something on my characters, it means I don’t care. Some people like to see achievements flashing just for the sake of it. I never got the point unless they showed something about skill (heroic achievements in ICC, for example), had a reward (Stinker!) or amused me in some way (To All the Squirrels I’ve Loved Before). Going to a level 70 raid with 8 other people from the guild, just for the sake of it, is less fun to me than leveling my non-heirloomed warrior who dies every 3 kobolds, and this killed a part of my Cataclysm enthusiam.

I don’t expect Blizzard to read my blog, but the thread on the official forums has some very articulate posters. I hope they listen to them.

Ever since I read Larisa’s post about her guild’s anniversary party I’ve wanted one of my own. Only one problem: the guilds I was in weren’t the type to organize in-game events. Then there was Soulbound… but they didn’t seem overly excited either when I suggested a party.

Looks like it was just a matter of timing and just getting it done without asking everyone.

The reason
On October 26th, the guild had its 6 months anniversary. (No, I’m not a weirdo that remembers the exact day she signed a charter. It just so happens that we made the guild on my brother’s birthday.) It was just the perfect opportunity: a celebration of our achievements and a way to say goodbye to Wrath of the Lich King.

Before the party
It started with a lot of planning, a lot of walls of text (mine) in the officer forums, a lot of camping for prizes, and my first eBay experience. We decided on having TCG loot cards for the winners (“what if the eBay codes don’t work, aaa!”), Black Tabbies for the people who came in second place, and raptor hatchlings for those in third place. I was a bit stressed out since, given the previous lack of interest, I was afraid we’d end up with more prizes than participants… so I was blown away when almost 20 people accepted the invite on the calendar. (I was also even more stressed out since our Vent only had 15 slots, but a guildie went and bought us a new, bigger one, woop!)

What went down
In the end, there was about 15 or 16 of us, with me playing master of ceremonies (getting that summer festival dress was worth it!). We had 3 competitions and an afterparty.

First off, we had a naked gnome race. I was going to make it an ‘any class/race combination’ (to see who chose the one with the best survivability), but my plan was shot down by my fellow officer V who said NO WE’RE MAKING NOAMS! You can’t say “no” to her, so we made noams :D

The victi… err participants had to run from Dun Morogh (gnome spawn point) to the Dam in Loch Modan.

It’s funny how adults can turn into squeeing gnomes when a level 5 leopard starts chasing them :D

We even acquired a friend on the way who protected the lil’ noams with her treants… (you can also see her above, in the tunnel picture, wearing a Gnomeregan costume). The rickroller is the gnome in front of her.

The race got exciting at the end, when a bunch of level 10 “you no take candle” stood between the participants and me. The winner was the person who managed to corpse run faster, in the end. I managed to let a couple of people die because my Clique settings were messed up… oops.

I felt like a kindergarten teacher among all the gnomes :P Complete with the responsibility, since they kept aggroing kobolds and I kept discovering that I have no mana regen while wearing an RP dress.

After we got all the gnomes to a safe place in one piece, we portaled them to Dalaran for phase 2: darts. Playing gnome darts is very fun: you get a bunch of them in the Dalaran sewers, you place a marker underneath (in this case, my Efflorescence and a bunch of flares), and you give prizes to the people who manage to go splat closest to the green stuff.

Before they jumped to their deaths, our gnomes took the time to scare people coming out of the portal room. Must be an unsettling experience to find a dozen of naked gnomes in the middle of Dalaran…

I don’t know how it looked from above, but from my point of view on the ground it was absolutely hilarious to watch the rain of gnomes.

After everyone was good and dead, we went back to our mains and Loch Modan, for the third event of the night: Find Borfi the Gnome! Originally “Find George the Gnome”, we ran into some trouble with using a level 1 character, so we drafted my boyfriend on his DK. The premise was simple: he was hidden somewhere in the area and he had drank an Elixir of something or other to prevent people from tracking him. Nevertheless, it only took a couple of minutes for him to be found… I was expecting it to be much harder.

And then… party time! An explorer-minded guildie took us to a “secret” vault in Badlands, where we celebrated with in-game toys and out-of-game booze. The TCG cards loot only added to the display of shiny stuff (pictured below, Path of Cenarius and the Sandbox Tiger).

We had cakes…

…toys…

…stripping…

…lighting effects…

…dancing…

…naked dueling…

…and fireworks!

We’re so cool we even have a video:

We have even more plans for next year. Until then… goodbye from Jen and the rest of Soulbound!

(Thanks to everyone for joining in the fun, to Bogdan for some of the screenies in this post and to Virgil for the awesome video)

Monday was a good day for science WoW. I haven’t cared much about seasonal events after I got the violet drake on my warrior (which I don’t play anymore), but eh, why not spend 20 seconds at the Headless Horseman. About a minute later… my shaman had this baby:

It looked like it was my lucky day, so I figured my priest kinda needs a new mount too. I logged onto the other realm… and got an invite 5 seconds later: the guild was having another go at Arthas. I was dead tired, but I couldn’t say no.

Two hours and a half later, he was hugging the floor, a first kill for this guild.

Before the patch, I was afraid killing him would be impossible with the new talents. Turns out I was very wrong.

Now, Soulbound isn’t full of super pro imba players and I won’t pretend I’m God’s gift to healing. I get tunnel vision and I get lost in a straight corridor. But this guild has… some sub par players.

Like the hunter who had never seen the LK and apparently never read up either. And who hadn’t changed one gem, so he had all crit and was doing an impressive 4.5K DPS at his peak.

…Or the other hunter, who was doing great DPS… while sitting with the group and not noticing the Necrotic Plague on her.

…Or the raid leader whose only method of troubleshooting a wipe was asking “Was healing a problem?”. (“No idiot, the hunter who wouldn’t run was a problem so I let her die instead of getting the plague all over us!”)
(After the 3rd time she did that, we decided not to bother yelling at her and we just dispelled her and hoped the Plague would jump to someone who can see the BIG BLUE DBM announcement.)

…Not to mention the noob disc priest who had to frantically whisper friends during the fight asking what to do… or the noob priest’s friend, the holy pally, who had only come back to WoW a week before.

The run was a bit frustrating at first, but I kept telling myself that I am not here to look down at them from my “my main has a frost wyrm” heights and that they do have a couple of very good players. The private channel where me and my friends could freely bitch helped too.

To conclude, if this group managed to get Kingslayer, anyone can. If you’re still working on the LK, don’t despair, you’ll get him down eventually. (Just please, don’t be that hunter.)

Tonight, we’re off to get KS for our alts on Alonsus too!

Edit: Of course, after writing the above… my “we killed LK in May” guild went to Sindragosa on alts and proceeded to wipe in the dumbest ways for an hour. Including yours truly trying to edit an in-game event during the raid and iceblocking everyone except the tank.

The patch dropped and the world didn’t end, despite what trade chat is saying. Personally, I find most of the changes good and the bugs not particularly annoying (I’m a night elf, so I don’t get the super slow ghost gryphons :P) They will probably be fixed soon, so I’m not panicking or raging.

I did a bit of ICC on two chars and these are the preliminary impressions.

Resto druid (mostly ilvl 264)
* Nourish is SLOW. I should probably move Regrowth to my Nourish keybind.

* The ToL cooldown is cool. It did help on BQL when everyone was dying, those insta-Regrowths were great. I don’t really get how I’m supposed to Wrath though… if ToL is a healing cooldown, it means I have to, well, heal, not DPS while people are dying.

* Mana isn’t a big problem, but I still managed to run OOM on BQL.

* I reforged all the crit I could to haste and I’m at ~950. Don’t think I’ll reach the new “cap” of 1000 something.

* Short Rejuv is sad :( Short Regrowth is not sad since it’s a “flash heal”. It would be a waste if it kept ticking when people were at max.

* Fury warrior DPS was depressing. Prot paladin was 3-4 on the DPS meters. DK dps and boomkin kept stealing aggro. 3-healing ICC normal meant I didn’t have anything to do.

Disc priest (mix of blues and ilvl 200-219 items)
* OMG everyone was buffed so much! They were hardly taking damage.

* My crappy geared priest, who I wouldn’t even take to ToC10, did fine in ICC. I was 2-healing it with a holy paladin for the first 4 bosses, then a resto druid joined in. (A resto/balance druid wearing half cloth and still rolling on it, using pure haste gems since before the patch, /cry.)

* I picked a non-smite spec for PvE since I was afraid of mana problems if I tried to DPS, and it felt exactly like pre-patch. Bubble, Flash Heal, Penance, rinse and repeat.

* I didn’t run OOM. I spent most of the fights above 70%. For my gear, this is extremely unexpected.

* The casual guild I joined on Defias is really nice, even though they have people like cloth-druid. They let me have all the drops I needed despite the fact that I have been there for less than 2 weeks and they were carrying me :D I have big plans for my gear so maybe I’ll actually be able to raid with them while Soulbound is on break \o/
[Er, is 2xT10 good for disc?]

I might be going back to ICC on Khrista tonight, I’m buying a dress before that, so with all these new upgrades I hope we can clear a fair bit. Discipline feel pretty similar to resto druiding at the moment, so I’m enjoying it a lot.

I was not prepared.

I know I said it’s not a big deal (and I still disagree with many of the arguments), but last night was sad.

I debated arranging a tree memorial myself, but by the time I decided, someone had already posted on the realm forums. When I logged in, there were a dozen trees dancing with Applebough. The number grew fast (as did the number of lumberjack and lighter jokes) and by the end I think we had a hundred, if not more, trees and supporters. We had a dance party, a parade, a group picture session on the Violet Citadel stairs and an awesome amount of Tranquility.

You can click on all the pictures to get bigger versions

I spent an hour or so celebrating treedom, then I logged on my shammy for Ulduar. (Ironically, I missed my tree even more, since shammy spells just weren’t cutting it for Firefighter.)

After the raid, I logged Jen and I healed a VoA (the official last raid as a tree). I don’t usually care about logging out of characters in “special” places, but I did it now. Someone suggested the Moonglade cemetery and it fit. 15 minutes before the server went down, Jen and her Teldrassil Sproutling went to bed in a druidy atmosphere… waiting to see what the patch brings.

Sadly, it looks like it brings this:

At the moment, I’m happy tree form is on a cooldown. I don’t want to be an ugly male tree. The model itself looks good, but it’s not me. I rolled a female character because I wanted to be a girl in game too. The old tree form was gender neutral at least… and I felt pretty as a slender tree waving my branches. The new model… no. Just no.

I won’t get into the expansion blues conversation. We’ve pretty much stopped raiding after getting our drakes. It’s good and it’s bad. I like my free evenings; I like being able to go to bed at 11 if I feel like it; I like being able to mess around on a level 15 hunter. I feel bad that we haven’t got a drake for a guildie who joined halfway through ICC, but who hasn’t bailed on us. Maybe it’s still possible, but I have a feeling the patch will break the specs so bad that ICC heroic will become impossible.

So, since half the guild is on holiday and the other half is moping around because we can’t raid with 5 people… I’ve eloped to Defias Brotherhood and finally got my priest to 80.

On every alt I try to find a new way of leveling. Some were strictly LFG, level 15 on. Some went through a furious questing process to speed up 70-80. Some went through a mix of questing, dungeoning and PvP. My previous 80, Aushra, quested. A lot. I had a self-imposed deadline to get to 80 and I quested my ass off. I I missed the deadline, but only by a day or so. So, when Khrista was up, I felt like poking my leg with a pointy fork was more fun than questing to 80 again. I had enjoyed BGing as disc while leveling, so around level 70 I decided Khrista will be my PvP alt, a little project to keep me interested until Cataclysm. I did quest from 78 to 80, but all the rest of my time was spent happily bubbling everyone in sight.

PvP noob
Do I have a clue? Barely. I don’t know strategy, I only have a vague idea about what’s needed to win the BG, but my PvE mindset works in PvP too: heal shit. (Around 78 I discovered I make a good flag carrier; at 80 I discovered that my amazing 178 resilience makes me a very dead flag carrier and I stopped trying.)

Now I’m learning. I added Cynwise’s blog to my RSS reader and I’m going back through the posts. I do WG every time it’s available and gather marks one at a time (while my home realm is very imbalanced towards the Alliance, Khrista’s realm is more Horde-heavy, so I’m told Alliance only wins WG on Wednesdays). I try to plan my honor upgrades and hope not to fuck up more than necessary (Who knew disc and holy have different sets? Not me!). I keep hoping to find some players who will notice the healer helping them and will defend me; it hasn’t happened since level 77.

I’m even genuinely enjoying the BG ragers. I think I shocked a polite fellow who was calling me “gay noob”… I told him that “lesbian” might be a better term and got the priceless reaction “OMG FREEK!”. Have I scarred his little mind?

…and yet, here comes PvE.
There’s always a but.

After almost 50 levels spent in a bank guild, I wanted company. One of my RL friends was in a casual raiding guild, so I applied and got in.

They are working on LK and my fingers are itching.

I think they already have the healing spots filled. I think one of them is actually discipline. I still can’t help wanting a spot in the team. Maybe it’s my savior complex – after all, I killed him in May, I could single-handedly down him for these people! Ok, I can barely heal PoS heroic, I have an amazing 4k GS (bow before my blues!), I ran oom all the time and I can barely find my spells, but I R PRO RIADERZ!

Going to the LK in T9 would be a stretch, anyway. But… then I saw a post by someone with a brain: when the patch drops, Triumphs and Frosts will convert to the same amount of Justice Points… so I can farm Triumphs now and use them to buy T10 in a week or less!

Easier said than done. It’s either the battlegroup, the LFG matching system, or the fact that all the geared players are on time-out now, but in one day of pugging heroics I experienced the following:
* A vote-kick out of PoS heroic. The tank had run into Garfrost while I was drinking and half an undergeared mana bar didn’t last until the end of the fight. I died, the boss died, Mr. Pro Tank lived, then kicked me.

* A 507 defense tank in another PoS hc, who kept swearing he wasn’t doing anything wrong. I managed to acquire a 50g repair bill by the time we got to the gauntlet and he decided to drop group. It was only then when I thought of checking his armory and the reason for his sudden drops in health became apparent… I was only sad he left before I could rage at him for making me think I was a bad healer.

* Impressive 3k DPS. Seriously, 3k was so rare it was amazing.

* A large collection of people without gems, enchants, proper stats or any clue about their classes or fights. I have no problem with beginners (hell, I haven’t bothered enchanting my gear because I plan on ditching it soon), but if you don’t know anything, ask! I had a FoS where only me and the tank knew the strategies. I have never seen Brohnjan get to 100% health after 4 minutes of fighting… between yelling from me and the tank to KILL THE FRAGMENTS! (For Devourer of Souls he made STOP DPS and GO DPS macros. We only wiped once… ironically, because he stood in the laser.) I won’t even mention the Oculus run where we wiped repeatedly on the way to Eregos, and then couldn’t kill him at all in the end.

Conclusion
Before yesterday, I dreaded the patch. It’s going to break my tree. My ex-tree, actually. I don’t like change and the idea of re-learning how to heal is not making me a happy Jen.

But now I can’t wait for it: my tree is going to get broken in the end anyway, but my priest could really, really use some T10 so she can heal through stupid. Two months until Cataclysm should be enough time to get a proper PvE set and a proper PvP one…

Binky says hi!

On April 26th, the last person signed the charter and <Soulbound> was officially born. We had two goals: kill the Lich King and get frost wyrms.

The Lich King died on May 19th. On September 2nd we got the wyrms.

I knew that we could do it, but it seemed hopeless at times. Small roster and people going on holiday, starting school, finishing school. Really bad nights when staying out of the fire seemed impossible. Wiping for hours on “easy” bosses. Saurfang heroic had our ranged for dinner repeatedly and P3 healing was a special kind of hell (not helped by the general lack of ranged in the guild). We went from constant 10% Putricide heroic attempts and a kill on the first night to wiping for 3 hours to killing him in 5 tries, from one week to another. Valithria heroic had everyone raging, and it felt like she’d never dielive. The next reset we were wondering why the hell we ever had a problem. Sindragosa heroic seemed to be the end of it; I’m still surprised we managed to kill her.

Last night we were 2 achievements away: All You Can Eat and Been Waiting a Long Time for This. We had been trying Sindragosa for a couple of nights. The normal strategy had failed in a bad way, we hadn’t even managed to get past the ice block. The zerg strategy kept getting us the 6th stack at 4-5%, even with my boyfriend brought in to help with his ICC25 heroic gear. Then tonight something clicked. After a couple of failed zerg attempts we gave the normal strategy a shot. And we got to 10% before people started fucking up the ice blocks. I was expecting a new horrible wipefest and… it wasn’t. Everyone was resetting their stacks in time. We fucked up the blocks (well, mostly I did) and people still killed the right one. I healed on auto-pilot and didn’t even see the health bars, only the stack counter. Then, 15 minutes before the raid end, achievement spam and yelling on Vent.

Only the Lich King stood between us and the wyrms. It was late, but it was also our last 10-man day for the reset, so we voted to give Mr Lich a try. Unfortunately we still had the Plague Wing up… but that was the fastest clear we’d ever done, they were all dead in 20 minutes. I was convinced we had no chance of getting the achievement: we’d wait for the 30 stacks, waste time and then wipe. One of the healers hadn’t even tried LK before so I kept imagining huge Defiles killing us.

First attempt, 30 stacks, dead people on phase 2. Release, run, rinse and repeat. I kept whispering strats to the new priest and watching the stacks of plague (tip: MyGhoul is a nice little addon that counts them for you). We got 30, we went to transition, the plague was still going strong at almost 40 stacks, we ran, we spread, we collapsed, I ran out of mana, I healed my roots out on Vile Spirits, I died, I was ressed, I went into Shadowmourne and I was so stressed I couldn’t find the guy at first, I couldn’t see the HP percentage… and then it was 10% and we died (yelling to the new guy to DO NOT RELEASE!!!). It was the longest RP we’d had. My hands were shaking and I kept thinking we fucked something up and we won’t get the achievement.

And then…

If you squint you can see our new priest getting Kingslayer

Vent was LOUD. My boyfriend got to show off his Jaina’s Locket and teleported us to Dalaran, where we, of course, promptly went to Krasus Landing for pictures, then we hovered above the “fly” spots for the next two hours. (One thing I discovered last night is that wyrms are an awesome means of recruitment. Spamming trade got us 2 or 3 unimpressive apps. Within 10 minutes of getting wyrms, we were getting whispers from 3-4 different people asking about recruitment. We’re not about to recruit and boost some random guys, but it’s nice to know.)

My new drake is called Binky – like the horse. Death’s Binky was specifically non-skeletal, and the wyrm is a girl, but I think the name fits her perfectly.

Getting the wyrms is a huge achievement for us. From three friends unhappy with their guild situation we became one of the best 10-man guilds on the realm, we raid with a great group of people and we have a blast. Glory of the Icecrown Raider is the end of the expansion for me. We’ll probably try heroic LK and heroic Halion, but I won’t be sad if we don’t get them. If Cataclysm dropped tomorrow, I’d be fully satisfied.

…and it’s getting worse.

Our raids start off as usual. Hi, how was your day, ok guys let’s buff up and go. Usually, 10 minutes in the raid, things start going downhill. Sometimes I swear half my guildies have a degree in “That’s what she said” and a detector for innuendos (inyourendos, ha ha ha). Sometimes they swear I should stop complaining because I’m worse. Somewhere along the way, we acquired a new raiding rule from our exasperated RL: everyone has to get laid before the raid. No one’s following it or it’s not working as intended, because Vent keeps getting filthier.

Then again, Blizzard aren’t helping things. As pointed out by Tam, some encounters make it impossible to keep a straight face. My personal one is Putricide (especially on heroic). “Two oozes, one room, so many delightful possibilities!” (Uh, you might not want to look for the source of that if you don’t know it already.) And don’t get me started on the plague. Our Vent usually sounds like some sort of deranged brothel where people are passing STDs left and right. “I’ve got it, who can take it next?” “Pass it to me!” “Ok, Jen got it!” I think I’ve snickered myself to death one time.

But, of course, we, the players behind the microphones, are the worst. I blame (British) English.
The priest is going down tomorrow. Going down to Cornwall to see her parents, but it was too late to take it back.
The tank wants to see how high he can get it. The debuff count for the Lich King achievement, of course, but that part was drowned out by the laughter.
Remarks about bosses being or getting big have been mostly phased out of our vocabulary, since they tend to result in at least three voices on Vent snickering in a meaningful way.

While the smut does get distracting at times, I love it. We’ve managed to kill 11/12 in 10 man heroic, we’re 2 achievements away from our frost wyrms, and I haven’t had this much fun raiding in… forever. Many people wouldn’t see it like this, but for me one of the best things about being in a small guild is the uncensored Vent, because we all know each other and we don’t have to hold back because of some new recruit or sensitive person.

(We might have scarred a few PuGs for life, though. But one of them came back for more!)

[Yeah, I'm not dead. I might post something more game-related at some point. Sometime.]