Back to the Grind

It's been a while since I posted. That's mostly because I've been playing the game at night and actually having to concentrate at work. Since I last posted, Hiahotah got to 80. I had started fourth thursday of november just into level 78 with the intention of grinding it out to 80 that day... I mean... Why the hell not? I've got nothing better to do that day... Man do I hate fourth thursday of november. But I digress...

I was making good progress towards 80 but at around 8pm after about 11 hours, I started getting a little punchy. I was working my way through Sholazar Basin and I was having a very hard time making decisions about gear, so I was just letting it accumulate in my bag. I was also having a hard time with a number of the "vehicle" quests. By 10 pm, I was a third of a level away. I could have made it but... I was completely asleep at the switch and I wasn't enjoying myself... So I shut it down early. Just turned off the computer and went to bed. I just can't understand those people who plow through to max level in just a couple of days.

Since then, I've been making the rounds of dailies: Seven in Icecrown (I'm over half way to exalted with Ebon Blade and about a third of the way with Argent Crusade), 3 in Sholazar (I got to revered with the Oracles just this afternoon and I'm not that interested in the trinket, so I'll probably stop doing those (on Hiahotah...)), one in Borean Tundra (for Wyrmrest Accord rep), another Wrymrest quest in Dragonblight, the Troll Patrol quests in Zul'Drak for Argent Crusade rep and now 5 in Storm Peaks for Sons of Hodir rep... Oh... And the cooking daily if it's not the one that takes 12 chilled meat.

I have to say... I do NOT like the Wrath dailies at all. There are no major quest hubs... Well... That's not entirely true... But a number of the quests just grant gold. No rep. No possibility of a badge... Just... Gold. That seems cynical to me. There _are_ 6 Ebon Blade quests in Icecrown... At two different locations. All told, it takes me about 3 hours to do those 24 daily quests... About a half hour of which is just traveling.

But that's not all... I really actively dislike some of the quests. I find them very frustrating. For example, he quest where you free prisoners from the mine in Icecrown where one of three things can happen - you can free them, they turn on you or... THEY JUST RUN THE WRONG WAY... IDIOTS!!! Very frustrating. Also in Icecrown is the one where you have to shoot down 20 drakes and riders. If you're not in a group, that one just sucks. Out loud. I did OK this morning when I was by myself but things didn't pick up until I joined forces with someone and we got credit for each other's kills. When you're not in a group, you only get credit for the ones you tag. If you're very unlucky, you could down 40 of them, but 20 would be credited to someone else. The patch notes on the PTR say that they are changing that quest so that you only have to kill 15 and it is reducing the energy cost of firing the cannon by half. It should make that quest better. I'm not sure how it got out of Beta that way. It's excruciating... Like the quest to control the super awesome looking cat to kill 50 wolvars in Sholazar... The cat that doesn't kill things any faster than I can kill them just by going into bear form and swiping 5-15 mobs at a time. And then there's the Apothecary quest in Zul'Drak... I can't tell you how many times I've gotten to adding the last ingredient and he's listed something that I've never seen before and there's only one of and, oh yeah, it's only found on the other side.

But the granddaddy, worst Wrath of the Lich King daily quest that I've found so far? It's the one for the Sons of Hodir where you have to harpoon a Wild Wrym and kill it while you're clinging to it's belly. You have to keep mashing the button (on a GCD) that tightens your grip while spamming a quick, small attack while the big attack is on cooldown and trying to dodge when he swipes at you but... Be careful... The big attack prevents you from dodging for about 5 seconds. Then at about 20-25% health, he switches over and you have to pry his jaw open and use a fatal strike that misses repeatedly. And... Yes... It does appear to be on a bit of a timer so don't take too long or you'll be unceremoniously dumped... Same if you lose your grip. I don't know if you would die from the fall because I'm on a druid and just pop into flying form on the way down. But I'm usually two minutes from the starting point and at low health after every attempt. It's never taken me less than 6 attempts and I've actually died from the quest at least 4 times.

That said... The quest line to open up the Sons of Hodir dailies is among the most fun quest lines I've ever done... Particularly one of the last quests... Where you're riding the drake with a harpoon in your hands and... Well... I won't spoil it for you. Trust me... It's fun. Do that quest line.

In other news, my death knight is almost 75 (About 3% away) and I did the For the Horde achievement series in a PuG last night. There were some coordination issues and people who didn't get credit for various kills started bailing. By the time we got to Ironforge, we were down to about 30 people and the Alliance started defending the boss there. But we ground him down with about 15 people still standing, rezzed the dead and hopped a portal to Dalaran... And in the mailbox... A Black war bear. I've been meaning to buy one of those but... Free is good too. I'll have to take it to Undercity at some point to see if I can fit onto the elevator while mounted...

Lost Weekend

I've been playing both my druid and my death knight still. Right now I've got the third highest level character in the guild at 76 (or more appropriately, the third closest to 80). I actually did all of the started quests in Howling Fjord and in Borean Tundra. I wanted to do the D.H.E.T.A quest line but couldn't find their camp (plus I was exploring new areas and doing new quests... I couldn't help myself... New content!!!). By the time I did find it, I was close to completing enough quests to get the achievement for quests for Borean Tundra. So now I'm working Dragonblight and the mobs are level 71-72. They die really fast. Particularly with the new rank of Ravage I got critting for 4k and the new rank of Mangle I got at level 75. There are a lot of new quest types, believe it or not. I'm pleased with the variation in the quests (and the lack of collect X of item Y quests with crazy low drop rates). It can still be tough with people spawn camping but I've been able to get through everything. The next pass will be faster because I know where things are now.

As for the Death Knight... Well... She's a problem. My druid would be at 80 by now (although there's still a chance I can overtake the others on the 4th Thursday of November - I boycott the event so I have the whole day free) if not for her. She's been a lot of fun. I plowed through Hellfire, Zangarmarsh, Terokkar and Nagrand. It's a lot easier because I know where everything is. I hit level 68 after a few quests in Blade's Edge and went straight to Northrend. While I'm not getting any major upgrades (I've upgraded my boots, bracers and trinkets and have some shoulders that will be good when I decide to break my PvP 4 piece for my DPS set and some balance upgrandes... No tanking upgrades though) on my druid, pretty much everything piece of plate is an upgrade for my death knight.

Along the way, I did a couple of quests that gave me pretty nice one handers and I tried dual wielding them. I don't like it. It seems to reduce my DPS AND reduces my spell damage - which in turn reduces the amount of healing I get from death strike. Since runes are a limited resource, I want the most bang for my buck that I can get out of them. So after a level of playing with dual wielding (to make sure it wasn't just the low sword skills that were hurting me) I switched back to my axe of killing everything dead (I got a BoE green axe "of the beast" that I could equip at 67 that does 110 dps - it's 70's heroic drop quality) and have been much happier. I hit 70 on Sunday morning and promptly forgot to get her flying mount training. So I went back to Ebon Hold to buy the special death knight flying mount that scales with riding skill. It cost 950 gold PLUS the 800 gold for flying mount training but it's TOTALLY worth it. It's arguably the best mount in the game. And in seven more levels... I'm really going to enjoy it.

Week One of Wrath of the Lich King

Big week up here at the lodge...

It's now been a full week (and 8 hours and one minute) since I got Wrath of the Lich King installed and I haven't been posting because I've been busy. Here are some of my early observations:

- Wow. Wow to the scenery. Wow to the details. Wow to Ember Clutch. Wow to the Death Knight quest line. Wow to death knights in general. So far I've only explored Howling Fjord and most of Dragonblight but what I've seen has been amazing - particularly Howling Fjord. Don't go there if you get vertigo. Between the mountains and the outright chasms... I've felt a little nausea a couple of times when I was riding near a cliff or down a mountain. The terrain is incredible. And some of the details... Like the pots of stew in some buildings (and at least one cave) that look like they are actually boiling and the vegetables are moving up and down... And the troughs in Utgarde keep that look like there's water dripping into them. And did I mention Ember Clutch? That just blew me away.

- The are vendors on the turtle boats. Getting around isn't cheap. I've seen flights as high as 2 gold 50 silver so far. So I've been making a point of using the turtle boats where practical and doing the daily quests at each end of their routes. In between, you can vendor and repair. That's a handy little time saver.

- March of the Giants. This quest brings out the worst in people. For this quest, you have to mine the corpses of 4 level 70-71 elites. They're easy enough to kill (OK... If you realize they have a stacking debuff and are smart enough to stay away from them) but the corpses aren't tagged for the person or party who killed them. Any jackass on the quest can just wait for you to kill it and mine the rune - meaning you don't get to do it. This happened to me three times. All three were ninja'd be members of the same faction. When questioned, two of them thought that "everyone got a whack". God... I hate people.

- Potential server transfer. Bloodscalp is one of about 20 servers that can take free transfers to a new server. The guild is discussing moving. I'm mostly against it. Yes... There have been some unfortunate crashes over the last couple of months. Yes, the server is down more often than Garithos. Yes, there have been queues lately. But it also has a vibrant population and I have friends there. I don't necessarily talk to them but I've spent many hours in Karazhan with them and it pleases me to see them running around. We buff each other, wave and move on. I also like that there are enough people in LFG that you can get a group together for just about anything. On my Alliance server, I once watched someone begging for a tank for the daily heroic for 3 hours. It made me sad. On Bloodscalp, I can get a group for just about anything - even if I'm on a DPS character. Plus, you can find just about anything on the AH at any point in time. I'll allow that the performance issues are a concern. But I already feel that some of the guild members are xenophobic and deliberately moving to a low population server would just reinforce that. I've done high pop and low pop and let me tell you... High pop is better. It's a social game. And I believe the queues will die down as soon as some of the excitement about the expansion wears off and people are done leveling and get back to normal usage patterns... And if some people transfer away...

- The first two instances - I've done Utgarde Keep twice and The Nexus three times. So far, I'm impressed. I had another "wow" moment as soon as I climbed the first set of stairs in Utgarde Keep. And the Nexus... It's like... Some weird combination of Botanica, Exodar and a Rubick's Cube. We've pretty much been facerolling those.

- Death knights. The starter quest line is amazing. Just great story telling. My friends with consciences have some problems with the early quests and some others have problems with their reception in the capitol city but on the whole I'd give a 12 out of 13 on that quest line. As for the death knights themselves... I've really enjoyed playing mine. Maybe it's because I'm more familiar with the content so I don't feel like I'm fumbling around as much. Maybe I really enjoy the playstyle. I don't know but I've really been enjoying myself. At first I was just button mashing and things were dying but I had to stop and eat frequently and my UI had hidden the rune bar so I had no idea when or why some abilities were unavailable. It did, however, force me to read my tooltips and I've developed a rotation that allows me to handle 3-5 mobs (although I prefer 1 on 1 fights... Always have... Except on the bear. Particularly now that swipe hits infinite targets. I took out 15 mobs (stood in the wrong place) the other day. But I digress... Death knight. Having a lot of fun with her. She's up to level 65 already and is at 376+ herbalism and 325 inscription. Hooray for the AH.

- Hiahotah is up to level 73. I'm struggling to play him but I suspect that most of that is me not liking that I don't know where everything is. I'll do a quest and then run back to turn it in and find that I had two other quests in the same area... And then there are some chains that just seem to send you marching back and forth between quest hub and the same quest area. Well... That and it takes 60 quests at 25k per to get the 1.5 million XP it takes to get a level these days. It takes me 3 days to get one level but only one on the Death Knight. We'll see. Tanking has been really fun so far and I've been putting up some really massive crits in bear form.

- Last night after we did Utgarde Keep, our mage (who is now 75) ported us to Dalaraan. So I spent about an hour looking around, picking up flight points, doing a daily cooking quest, talking to vendors... You know... Touristy stuff. I set my hearth there and got kicked out of the Alliance section... I wasn't going to cause any trouble... Honest. Why does no one ever believe me? To be fair, those huntards who ganked my death knight (shot me in the back with a mob on me... It is their way) had that thrashing coming... OK... Thrashings... But I didn't start that one and I certainly didn't hover around a the corpse of someone I'd just shot in the back and had outnumbered two to one. It's not _my_ fault that my level 70 paladin happened to be nearby. Where was I? Right... Dalaran. Nice place. I'm not paying 750 gold for a bear mount. I might pay 600... But only if I thought I could get around in Undercity while riding it.

So far... I'm enjoying the new content. I could do without some of the running around and the quest hubs in the middle of nowhere that have 3 quests and that's it but I'm sure that will bother me less the second or third time around.

Position in the queue: 538

I've got a few minutes to kill tonight. There's a queue. Bloodscalp has always been a busy server, but there hasn't been a queue to speak of since the first couple of weeks I played the game. It does, however, give me a chance to talk about that last 24 hours...

I got to the mall at a little after 10 pm and they were being very efficient. They were having people pay for the game early and then at midnight, we would exchange our receipts for a copy of the game. I was about 35th in line so once they started handing them out, I'd be getting it quickly.

The guy running this event takes his gaming very seriously and he was really earnest. Every 15 minutes he came out and threw gifts to the crowd. For really exciting items, he had people do a dance from the game. Some people were into it, but I'd brought a folding chair. I wasn't going to get up for some t-shirt. I already have too many of those.

I talked to a couple of people for a few minutes... Including someone who, apparently, writes for Azeroth Advisor. The woman behind me in line was clearly there picking it up for a child. Kind of disappointing because she was exactly the kind of person I'd expect wouldn't play WoW.

I had my copy and was in my car by 12:06. It was 1:06 before I got logged in. I started a Death Knight and... That quest line is incredible. Lots of new quest types. Great story line. Lots going on. Everyone should roll a Death Knight even if they never play it past that opening line. I played until 2 in the morning before I called it a night.

The next morning, I started right up and finished that quest line. 3 hours. Blues at every slot that are equal to anything I've gotten in Outland so far. 14 slot bags... And an epic mount. Nice. I still don't really have any strategy. I specced her frost and I pretty much just mash 3-4-5-6. Still... I could see how that class could be a lot of fun.

In the afternoon, some of my guild members started logging on and we started doing some of the first quests in Howling Fjord. There's one quest where you have to kill 3 named mobs. Talk about your spawn camping. About 15 people were just spamming AoE trying to tap the mobs. But it was the precursors to a quest for Utgarde Keep, so we stuck with it.

After that, we ran Utgarde Keep. I'm still not entirely sure how to get there. I ended up circling around through what looks like the Alliance starting area. We pretty much facerolled the instance but it was spectacular. That first room... Wow... Just... Wow.

After that people started logging on and it became harder and harder to do quests. My death knight was in Outland and it was pretty much the same thing... But with a bunch of level 70's who didn't have the game yet who were just griefing lowbies.

On the whole, I'm really excited and impressed with what I've seen. And now I'm 7th in the queue so... Back to the grind...

A little pre-wrath downtime

The servers are down so I've got a few minutes to kill. There's a lot of excitement in the guild about the release of Wrath of the Lich King. We're planning which continent we're going to start with and already starting to look ahead at replacing gear.

For my part, I've been thinking about the last expansion. When Burning Crusade came out, I was still in Crucify and the first signs of the impending breakup were in the air. We'd recently gone through a shakeup in our raiding style. We cut down on our number raiders instead of making a second Blackwing Lair run. It was decided that we'd be more successful with a smaller number of more serious raiders. It was the right decision but it caused a little strife and some people left. We hadn't raided in a few weeks because people were busy PvPing (they'd just switched to the new honor for gear system) and just taking time off before the expansion. Our guild leader, a young man I knew as Crazyirish, had gotten a new job so he was unavailable. He was very well liked. He could be a little drunk during our first forays into Naxxramas and we'd be setting up pulls on new trash mobs, someone would ask "what does that mob do?" and Crazy would announce "Let's find out..." launch a frostbolt at it and iceblock. But people loved him so it was OK. When he stopped coming around, people stopped coming out and we couldn't really browbeat people into raiding.

Hiahotah was still a level 38 druid that I never, ever played... Like... Never. So when it came time to go to the midnight release, I didn't have the current local guild to go there with... So I went alone. I got there pretty early so I was near the start of the line. There was a group of college students who obviously played together right behind me. She talked at length about her mage. From the sounds of things, she hadn't done anywhere _near_ the things that I'd done but she loved that mage just the same. But I didn't talk to anyone because I was the oldest person there who wasn't obviously buying it for their kids by about 5 years. I was a little embarassed to be in my mid-30's and waiting in line for a video game.

So... Here I am... Almost two years later. I've pretty much switched factions (although I've been playing my Alliance characters almost exclusively since the release date was announced). I now have 6 max level characters instead of just two. I have a fairly godly tank and a group of people to run the new instances with. I play with a group of local people... People I know in real life.

And yet... Because of real lives and the Gamestop where most people ordered their copies of the expansion, I'll be attending the midnight release alone again. I think this time, I'll try to make more of it. Maybe I'll go through the line and ask people which server they play on. Maybe I'll run into someone I've given a complex over the years. Or maybe I'll just run into someone else who plays a druid and we can just talk about theorycrafting... Like, maybe, the funniest thing you can do to a huntard (there's never a time when it isn't funny to sleep a huntard's pet).

As for what I do after I get the game installed... I just don't know. I don't want to get too far ahead of everyone else because some people I play with regularly won't be getting the game until the weekend. I still haven't decided which one of my characters I'll level first. I could roll a death knight but... So will everyone and their uncle. People will be spawn camping again. I'm not looking forward to those first two nights because there just won't be any mobs to fight. Of course... This year, I've got a group to do instances with... And new bosses with new abilities.

"What does this boss do?"

"Let's find out..."

360 Degree Threat Generation for Druids

A number of people have been complaining in various forums about the lack of 360 degree threat generation for bear tanks... Which is to say: Swipe only hits targets in front of you. Paladins have 360 degrees of threat generation with consecrate and warritards have... I'm going to say... Thunderclap but bears only get 180 degrees with swipe. I've given this some thought and come to the following conclusion:

I'm OK with that.

And here's why: I've never played a warrior but I have tanked on a paladin - and this was before swipe and thunderclap hit more than 3 targets so if you wanted an AoE tank, you wanted a paladin - and even then, I positioned the mobs so that they all faced me. Why? One reason: You can't parry attacks from behind.

A tank has two dual roles: Threat generation and damage mitigation. If you're going to choose one, it's safer to err on the side of mitigation. If you're low on threat generation but high on survivability then the DPS can just learn to count to three but a tank that can't stay alive for three seconds is of no use to anyone. So while you _can_ tank with your back to mobs on a paladin or a warrior, you're going to want to have them all in front of you so you can parry.

Druids can't parry (or block) but they will want to keep all mobs in front of them to be in swipe range. In my opinion, all tanks should be positioning themselves so that all mobs they are fighting are in front of them: Paladins, warriors and death knights for the chance to parry and druids for the threat generation of swipe.

But if you REALLY want 360 degree threat generation on a druid... Pop into caster form, hit yourself with Barkskin and drop a Hurricaine right on top of yourself.

Laundry Day

I don't have a washer and dryer in my appartment so I tend to wait as long as I can before making one big trip to the laundrymat - generally 4 weeks. I've got it down to a point where I'm in and out in under two hours. The problem is... I was planning on doing laundry last Sunday but I ended up being so sick I could barely get out of my chair and I felt exactly the same way on Monday. On Tuesday and Wednesday, I still had remnants of whatever was affecting me so I just went straight home after work. By Thursday I was feeling better but, eh... I'd made it that far. Why not just wait for the weekend, right?

So here I sit at the laundrymat in (what passes for) the bad part of town (in Vermont). The tiles are cracked. The washers are old and dented. The regulars have some opinions about which dryers to use and which ones to avoid. The ceiling tiles are stained and there's fly walking on the cover of the flourescent light above me. On the other hand, it's relatively cheap and, at the moment, it's empty except for me.

What surprises me, however, is the number of wireless signals I'm getting in this part of town. I'm getting no fewer than 10 signals right now. What surprised me even more is how many of them are secured. Only two aren't and of those, one has too weak a signal to connect to and the other one is only connecting at 1-2 mbps. I can't play WoW, but I _can_ make a blog entry.

My latest WoW projects have been getting Hiahotah the "Guardin of Cenarius" title - not because he needs another title but it seems like a very druidy thing to do and because of the amount of work I've already done - and getting Hoban a "the Hallowed" title.

Hiahotah is already exalted with the Cenarion Expedition because I wanted to get the Earthwarden. I did that by getting in every Steam Vault run our guild ever did for a number of months. When that wasn't enough, I single pulled the slaves in the hallway before the bridge to the second boss in Steam Vault for hours... About 8 of them, I'd say. At 12 rep per mob and with an average of around one Coilfang Armament per reset... It was excruciating. (Hold on... Time to move the laundry...)

OK... I'm back. Sorry about that. While it's totally awesome that I can still fit in clothes I wore 15 years ago and with the changes in my body, a lot of the more cavernous articles now look less clownish... 5 weeks worth of laundry... There's a _lot_ of it. But I digress... Where was I? Oh yeah... Guardian of Cenarius.

However, when I looked at his Cenarion Circle rep, Hiahotah wasn't even half way through Friendly. It makes for a long haul. I know because I've done that grind before. Back in the day, we were running AQ20 a lot and I really wanted the sword you could get 1) if you got the drop and 2) you were exalted with Cenarion Circle. So for weeks, I ran silithyst dust. If the Alliance controlled Silithus, it was because I had made the run about 190 times that day. I ground Twilight Cultists by the hundreds. I collected hundreds of texts. And I _got_ to exalted... And the drop came. It was between me and a druid. When he found out that I'd gotten to exalted with CC, he let me have it. A pretty mature attitude for a 13 year old.

So I got my sword... And I got it enchanted and I went out and even leveled my sword skills for a bit - I was that excited... Until it got replaced about 3 weeks later with a staff from later in AQ20. Typical.

So I thought about the grind a little and decided to see how I liked it at 70. I did a few quests. I tried the combat quests and those just weren't worth the time. So I went back to just grinding cultists. While they doubled the rep gained per mob from 1 to 2, the big improvement to the rep grind is that you now get 500 rep per encrypted text turn-in - up from 100. If you happen across the Twilight prophet (who is a lot easier to solo as a level 70 feral druid than with a level 60 fire mage), that's 7 to 10 texts right there. The cultists die in a couple of mangles. And with feline Feral charge, closing the gaps between them is faster. In just a few hours, I've gotten to 4k/21k to exalted. I might be able to do that by the end of the weekend.

As for Hoban the Hallowed... That was a quirk of the RNG. I won a roll on the helm and got the squashling as a drop from trick or treating. I'd already downed the Headless Horseman so from there it was mostly a question of flying to every inn in Azeroth and getting people to hit me with the wands. I hit up all the candy buckets and just with the people who were on last night, I got all but the ninja wand. When they remove the objective to collect one of each mask as a requirement for the title, I'll just have one wand left for the title. Someone in the guild will have it.

And now my laundry is "dry" (or at least what passes for dry here) so it's time to fold it and go home... Maybe I'll try to get into a Kara raid this afternoon. We'll see.

Busy, Busy, Busy

Wow... Just... Wow.

I was so worried that the game would change radically and I be lost of fall behind or something. Boy was I wrong... And right. The 3.0.2 patch was just what I needed. I'd been just marking time until Wrath of the Lich King and... Boom!!! All kinds of fun goodness dropped right in my lap. I've been playing almost non-stop since. There's all kinds of new, fun things to do - including but not limited to:

1) Playing a paladin: For years people have made fun of me because I had two paladins and how boring they are. Who's laughing maniacally now, bitches!!! Retribution got so many buffs that paladins are the "it" class right now. I did a WSG and someone said "Oh good. We've got 3 paladins. We're going to tear shit up" (his words, not mine) and that we did. Ret has become such luscious burst damagey fun that I can't play my paladins enough (nor can other people. I've seen 5 on a side in WSG and 12 in AV). I just want to go and smash things. I like watching rogues run away (or even help me quest just so I don't turn on them and squash them like the bugs that they are). I like seeing a warlock and thinking I can kill him. I like destroying warriors... And huntards... They're the best. Making them go splat while they flail away with their clumsy little toy weapons.

But seriously... The first day, my Alliance server came up first so I took that paladin on a tour of Stormwind harbor (that place is magnificent by the way... those dwarves have been busy... And there's now a way to get from Stormwind to Darnassus that _doesn't_ involve a run through level 20-27 contested territory. /cry) and tried out ret. I did the two Skettis dailies and later told my horde guild: If you see a ret paladin, you do what we do... You run. I was still clumsy at it but... Damn... Things just die so quickly and I don't lose mana because of replenishment and judgement of wisdom. If something _does_ live long enough (and between Crusader Strike, Judgement, Divine Storm and Hammer of Wrath, very few things do) to do damage, I get an instant cast flash of light often enough to keep me at full health. It's obscene...

So I've been PvPing up a (divine) storm. It's just too fun. I know the nerf bat is coming so I'm enjoying it while I can... On both of my paladins. Words elude me for how fun it is. I can walk up to another character and do 12k of damage before they are really even aware that something is hitting them. Each has earned enough honor to pick up a couple of pieces of Merciless Gladiator's gear and I soloed a mob in Botanica on my Alliance paladin(and on my Alliance mage) so I could fill out the rest with the blue gear.

2) Karazhan: After the patch, people were on and interested in trying out their fancy new 51 point talents - myself among them. I was also worried about how much my armor was being nerfed. It turns out that the armor on PvP gear was not lowered and since I used 4 pieces of PvP gear to tank in, I was almost completely unaffected. I lost about 5.5k armor but it's a lot less than I thought it would be. With swipe affecting more than 3 mobs, Hiahotah is a tank tank tank tank tanking machine. The 8 pulls of mage killers in the ballroom? Didn't lose a single one of them. So we breezed through Opera with 8 people on one night. The next night we got all the way through to Chess and even took a look at Prince - with 9. We had 10 on Sunday night but the server crashed and was down for over an hour. Everyone left. Monday we had 10 again and we downed Prince for the first time... On our first attempt. And then we did the same with Illhoof, Netherspite and Nightbane - all guild firsts. We've cleared Karazhan - sure the mobs have 30% less health but that's never been the problem for us. It's about finding a time when 10 people are on. But those times are few and far between because people have jobs and wives and husbands and kids and... Well... You don't want to miss summer by staying inside and playing video games. There hasn't been a time in the last 5-6 months when we couldn't have done it if we'd had the time. But now that's done. And about 9 people got the "Karazhan" Achievement. Which brings me to:

3) Achievements: An interesting wrinkle. It gives you something to work towards. I've spent time just wandering around zones and getting to the one or two nooks or crannies I didn't get to and getting an Achievement out of it. I did a couple of the fishing items. I've done a few of the PvP Achievements (including the 300k damage one that I got last night during a long WSG turtle). In some ways, Achievements are ruining battlegrounds because people are selfishly doing things that, under normal circumstances, help the team but if the other team is doing the same thing, their selfish individual goals prevent us from winning - specifically trying for the "Not in My House" achievement - where you have to kill 10 flag bearers before they leave your flag room. I hated WSG before and I hate it more now. But I got my marks for the Alliance paladin's new bracers so I'm done for a while.

4) Hallow's End: As of yesterday, the Sinister Squashling and the helm can drop from trick or treating and not just from the Headless Horseman event. My horde paladin now has both of them so... I'm feeling like I should go for the "The Hallowed" title - which as of 3.0.3 will no longer require the "collect 20 masks" quest. We've also done the Headless Horseman event a few times. We all have the rings from last year but it's still a way to get the Squashling. And we _do_ have some new alts that don't have the rings and haven't got the achievement to kill him. I got to do him on my horde paladin last night and we thrashed him. He didn't even throw out pumpkins on phase 3. And then I two hand tanked him. I put on all my +dodge/parry/defense tanking gear but kept my giant epeen and beat the crap out of him to hold aggro. It worked pretty well, but I took a lot more damage than I would have if I'd worn a shield... But where's the pleasure in that.

5) Inscription: With the assistance of our resident packrat, I got my horde inscriber to 350 (the effective max level right now) but the Alliance side has required a certain amount of gathering. She's only up to 215 or so. But they can both make armor vellums so I've FINALLY been able to enchant my alts' gear. FINALLY. It's been so frustrated to have a max level enchanter all decked out in epics and alts that don't even have the most basic enchants on their gear. No more. All I need now is a spin around the Hinterlands with an herbalist and I'm good to go. I've also been trying to recoup some of my expenses so I've spent a little time at the AH.

6) Titles: Some of my characters already have titles. Hiahotah has three: Champion of the Naaru, Ambassador and Grunt. Gifteye has Lt. Commander (and is closing in on Ambassador). Kaylee has Ambassador. Touchofgrey is a Sergeant Major. But Hoban doesn't have a title. He's a few costumes and a few trips to the candy buckets of Kalimdor away from "the Hallowed". Hiahotah is exalted with CE and I could grind out the Cenarion Circle rep pretty easily. I've certainly done it before... But on a level 60 mage. As a level 70 tank, I have other options - namely completing group quests solo, summoning mini bosses and jumping that level 60 elite that drops 7-10 encrypted texts every time I see her - not to mention popping my head into AQ20 to try to solo some of the early trash pulls. I'm proud of the Champion of the Naaru title, but the Guardian of Cenarius also seems fitting.

There's just so much to do, I get distracted. My Alliance characters need the most love in the way of grinding and gathering, but the horde guild is considerably more active so I have been hanging out there a fair amount (including 5 trips to Karazhan in 8 days). I should really pick one goal and stick to it because as soon as the expansion comes, it's a race to 80 (with 5 70's now, not 2), rolling a death knight and then it's all the new instances... And heroics... And then Naxx-10. It will be 6-8 months before I even think about doing any of these things again.

Slow... Deep... Breaths (patch day)

It's patch day... But not just _any_ patch day... It's a major upgrade patch day. As in going from 2.4.3 to 3.0.2. There's so much going on. 51 point talents. In game calendars. A new profession. Major changes to some mechanics that I've gotten very accustomed to. Breathe, big fella... Breathe.

This is my second major version change since I started playing WoW. The first one wasn't that big a deal because I'd only been playing for about 9-10 months and because there weren't any major changes in the class that I played. Now I've been playing for almost three years. I have two max level mages, two paladins and a druid (and now a level 64 rogue and a level 60 druid... And a level 52 priest... And that's just the characters I play). I'm set in my ways and there are major, major changes happening:

1) Spell damage and healing are all being rolled up into spell power. This will change some of my tanking gear on my paladins.
2) Spell hit and melee hit are just becoming hit. This can only help my paladins...
3) Druid armor is being reduced considerably. The multiplier is going from 400% to 370% and a lot of gear is being re-itemized to reduce armor and increase stats like stamina and agility. I've read in one place that PvP gear is not having the armor lowered. I use at least 2 pieces of PvP gear already and have lots more I could switch in so I may be good there. But it's still a big change. I may more than make up for that in damage reduction from the Protector of the Pack talent. Time will tell.
4) Druids will be uncrittable with talents. That means I don't need any more +defense gear... Nor do I need +defense gems. I can replace those with agility now I guess. Or +hit I guess.
5) Inscription. I'm going to need to spend some time leveling that... I've got two toons pegged for that and some herbs stored up. It will take a few more runs around lowbie areas to get to respectable levels but at least I should be able to send enchants to alts... Which means I can put +spell power enchants on my paladins' weapons. FINALLY!!!
6) The health of raid mobs is going to drop by 30% or so. That means we're going back into Kara. And the night people are free is... Tonight.
7) 51 point talents. Berserk is looking like a lot of fun (so is Rocket Kitteh...). But I haven't even looked at the 51 point talents for paladins or mages... Or rogues or priests... Gah...
8) Swipe hits an unlimited number of targets. That should be great for holding threat on big pulls... Hello non-elite 8 pulls in Karazhan that kill the mage every time (... that I don't bring my paladin).
9) MASSIVE changes to the paladin seal/judgement/blessing system. I haven't even thought about that one.

There are many, many more changes. Too many to list here. I'm getting a headache just thinking about it. Plus I'm having a little angst. What if Hiahotah suddenly becomes... Less overpowered as a tank. People are counting on me to start tanking things again. What if I start letting them down? What if I stumble with the new talents for the next few days?

And I'm trapped here at work... Not that I could log on yet but... I'm trying to concentrate on remapping user printers to the new print cluster when my head is swimming with new information. I'm nervous and excited at the same time...

At least the patch is installed and ready to go. 2.5 hours to go...

Know your enemy: rogue II

Ugh... Just... Ugh.

I went through all the trouble of posting how to shred a rogue as a feral druid and... Ugh. Now I certainly don't expect _anyone_ to read this... But... COME ON!!! I mean... REALLY!!!

Which is to say... So there I was - just minding my own business doing the "Now that we're friends" quest in Zangarmarsh on a level 62 Alliance rogue. I was at half health and had a level 64 melee naga on me when I got jumped by a level 65 horde druid. It happens, right? It's what they do.

Anyway... Back to the story. He did the pounce, shred stuff that you should do to open and got me down to just a few hundred health before the pounce wore off. I'm a goner... But I have to play it out, right?

So... Just as the stun is wearing off, he pops out of cat form and moonfires me.... Moonfire? Seriously? Of all the tools in your arsenal, that's the one you choose? Great googly moogly that was stupid. I managed to gouge him (I appeared to have finished off the mob AND looted it) and sprint off.

Now it's possible that this is my fault for not mentioning this, but rogues get tons of health potions from pickpocketing. They pop them like candy. So that's what I did. Now I've got enough health to ride out the moonfire and as soon as it ended, I stealthed... Not even vanish... Stealth. I was out of combat, after all... And I took a hard right and watch that rimnod run right on by.

SHAME!!! SHAME SHAME SHAME!!! You have embarassed everyone who ever played a druid. The single most important thing you can do to a rogue - particularly before 66 when they get cloak of skill - is hit them with FAERIE FIRE!!! God damn it... Do I have to tell you EVERYTHING???!?!?!? TWICE??!?!?!?

Faerie Fire, feral or normal (and he went to caster form to moonfire me so... that was an option), lowers armor AND PREVENTS THE VICTIM FROM STEALTHING. So here's how that _should_ have gone:

1) You pounce and shred. Good. Excellent. Maybe throw in a rake for the extra DoT, but on the whole, a solid opener.
2) You hit me with faerie fire.
3) I gouge you and sprint away.
4) Gouge wears off and you dash after me. After dash wears off, you go into cheetah form and close the remaining distance - particularly if I stop to mount up.
5) Win.

But no... Moonfire. /cry

Sweet Dreams

So... Here's the thing... I was playing my Alliance paladin the other day and he got a lockbox as a drop. Normally, that's not a problem, but this one required 325 lockpicking to open. So I had a choice. I could either start spamming trade chat with "LF rogue with at least 325 lockpicking. Will tip!!" or open it myself. I'd hate to pay some rogue to give me access to something "of the whale" so I opted for opening it myself.

Just one small problem: My rogue was only level 51 and to get 325 lockpicking, you have to be at least level 65... But it's the pre-exansion doldrums so I figured "What the hell?". So I started plowing through the levels. With a 1.5 level rested bonus, decreased level sizes and increased quest XP (and work and sleep), I didn't hit the end of my rested bonus until well into level 60. Somewhere along the line, I picked up the daily battleground quest for AV.

So I tried that a few times at level 59 and 60. It turns out that the Alliance is as bad at level 51-60 AV as they are good at 61-70. Most of it is a lack of participation. So I sat on the quest... And as soon as I got to 61, I was at the battlemaster in Shattrath and joining the queue.

Alterac Valley at level 61 isn't all that much fun - even as a rogue. You're not fooling anyone. They see you coming a mile away even when you're stealthed. Unless...

They're distracted by something else. So after one of my frequent deaths (if I can get off a cheap shot, before I'm killed, it was a good run), I rezzed back at the Stormpike Aid Station. Deadly Boss Mods indicated that the South Bunker would cap in about 2 minutes. So I went there and stealthed. Tabbing around, I targeted a level 70 rogue at 37% health. He was targeting a level 70 warrior so I walked to the upper level and looked for him. I got him with a Cheap Shot and then a backstab. He died shortly thereafter (I assume the warrior caught up to him) and we re-took the bunker.

Afterward, the warrior said (something along the lines of): "rogues are such bullshit." and then "no offence" (yes... with a c). I whispered back: "None taken. I hate rogues. I only play mine ironically". It turns out that the rogue had been sapping, stunning, sapping, gouging, blinging, sapping and otherwise stunning the warrior for almost the entire time the south bunker had been "contested".

My point? None really. But last night I had a dream (it's rare that I have WoW dreams. That's why this stuck out) that I came across a rogue who was obviously AFK and thought he was safe because he was stealthed and I ganked him. It was a happy, joyful dream. One I hope to realize (again) some day.

Disjointed

With the expansion fast approaching, there isn't really much to do progression-wise so I've been taking care of some things I've been working on for a while - most of it on the Alliance side.

I've decided that I want to get one of the Dranei mounts for Gifteye. I don't know why. It just seems fitting. So that means getting to exalted with Exodar. Even with the human 10% bonus, that's proven time consuming - but it was a blast running around the Dranei starting area at level 70. You don't get much for gold for the lowbie quests, but they still give full rep. Next will come a couple thousand turn-ins in AV to make up the remaining 5k or so.

I've gotten both of my Alliance 70's to exalted with Shattered Sun Offensive. Gifteye is exalted with the Scryers. I've been doing some quests that have been in the Alliance toons' logs for well over a year. I've also collected enough gold between them to get one of them an epic flying mount. It would bankrupt me... But I'm thinking about it.

The Brewfest boss has been a pleasant distraction. I've run it 11 times now and it's a good way to kill an hour or two. It's something the guild can do with small numbers and minimal time commitments... Plus it's guaranteed gear that is equivalent to the 41 badge trinkets. I've already picked up a couple of them.

The one thing that I've been doing to help prepare for the expansion, however, is to try to get some legitimate weapons for my paladins. They have decent one handers but the best two hander they have is the axe you can get at revered with SSO. They _can_ kill things... It just takes a while. So I've been PvPing to get the Meciless Gladiator's Greatsword for both of them. That means a lot of time in Alterac Valley...

And maybe it isn't this way on EVERY server but it's like the difference between night and day. On my horde server, the horde wins occasionally but when they do, it's a somewhat protracted affair. They do the same thing every time and they lose and lose and lose. Every rushes to kill Balinda. Someone will tap Stonehearth Bunker and Icewing Bunker and then abandon it to fight for Stormpike Graveyard. Every time they see someone on the road, they stop and fight them. They pull the NPC's by the Aid Station flag EVERY SINGLE TIME. It's the classic definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. I think someone might have won once with that "strategy" and then told everyone about it so often they horde thinks it's the only way to win. Needless to say, the horde honor grind can be quite frustrating.

The Alliance, on the other hand, is methodical. Brutally efficient. Half the squad goes to kill Galv. A bunch goes ahead and taps towers while a token force stays back to slow the horde down because that's all it takes. When they tap a tower, 3 to 5 people will stay there until it caps. They go back and recap towers the horde has tapped. They skip horde along the way and go straight for the game objectives - usually the Frostwolf Relief Hut. And you can tell that they've thought it through... You want to know how I know that? Because if you cap Frostwolf Graveyard before the Relief Hut, you are called all kinds of names... I mean... Really bad names. It isn't done.

The logic is simple. There are 4 major objectives in the horde base: two towers, a graveyard and Drek. If you cap FWGY before the RH, any horde you kill will respawn back in the base. This means that they can throw themselves at the Alliance in waves. But if you cap the RH first, they spawn... Elsewhere and they have the base to themselves. They thought it through.

Plus there's a whole different attitude. Everyone is pleasant. They say please. They say thank you. No one is yelling at anyone (who doesn't cap FWGY before FWRH, of course). They don't really even give directions or discuss strategy. Everyone knows what the plan is.

And it works... Today I went 18-1. Most of the games were 10-12 minutes and we only got less than 400 bonus honor points twice (a 399 point win and 357 in a loss). The one loss was a protracted affair where they had a lot of people respawning at FWGY and they repeatedly wiped us on Drek. And I think I only had one loss on Saturday - and that was to a premade. We still came up with 252 points and still almost pulled it out.

Not only has it been a fun experience ("I love winning. It's, like, better than losing." - Ebby Calvin "Nuke" LaLoosh) but I think I've gotten a little better at tanking as a paladin. My Alliance paladin doesn't have anywhere near the gear that my horde paladin does so I have to really push my abilities to generate threat and to stay alive.

When I tank for my horde guild, I generally open with Seal of the Crusader and built additional threat that way. But in the battlegrounds, people don't necessarily wait. They just open with their biggest nuke so I have to have a big threat lead to maintain aggro. That means loading up Seal of Righteousness, popping my wings, throw Avenging Shield and then judge Righteousness on my way in and then drop a consecrate at the back. That usually allows me to keep the boss on me for the duration of the fight. But I have to keep an eye on my holy shield to compensate for my gear... But I have to keep consecrate up and keep judging righteousness to keep threat... It's a lot of work.

At about 500 honor points per game, I'm just 8 or 9 games away from a new toy. Here's hoping the horde doesn't think it through in the next 18 hours... What am I saying? Of course they won't... Sometimes I'm not sure if they can.

The Obligatory "The Expansion is Coming" Post

Blizzard recently announced that the Wrath of the Lich King will be released on 11/13/2008. There's a lot to look forward to including but not limited to: Death Knights and a new profession, Inscription.

Inscription will allow you to modify certain spells and abilities through the use of Glyphs. One of the first ones that was announced was the Glyph of the White Bear. This glyph changes your bear form to that of a polar bear.

Whoopie.

Yes. I've been staring at the unpleasant end of a bear for the better part of the last year and a half... With some off and on time before that. But one of the big complaints about druids is that... There's no variation between forms. Some of us have worked very hard to improve our gear or to grind rep and there's no way of showing that. Every single bear looks like every other bear. Alliance. horde. Doesn't matter. My level 58 female night elf druid in blues in greens looks just like my level 70 tauren druid in Arena and badge reward epics.

But now we have the option to get Glyph of the White Bear....

Whoopie.

Now there will be exactly two types of bears running around. Granted, it's a 100% increase over the previous two and a half years that I've been playing but... There are millions of druids out there.

I'm not (necessarily) advocating that Blizzard find a way of displaying gear when druids are in forms. That would be a tremendously difficult task... But I remember back in the day when my Alliance mage was walking around in 7/8 Tier 2. You KNEW where he'd been. You KNEW how much work he'd done. And, if you were a warrior, you KNEW you should start running now (or should have... Some of them _still_ got out their epeens and gave it a shot).

Not so with my druid. He's a fierce tank. He's done some crazy, crazy, impossible things. But he's also done some really, really tedious things. I single pulled mobs in Steam Vault for about 6 hours to get to exalted with Cenarion Expedition to get my Earthwarden. I wear their tabard with pride. It says: "Yeah... I've done the work. If you have me as your tank, you know I'll have one of the top mitigation/threat generation weapons in the game."

But you don't know that most of the time. All you see is bear. And maybe you don't remember that when things go wrong. Maybe you forget that I've got the gear and that you should just take a deep breath because as long as I've got a healer (and sometimes if I don't) we'll get through this.

And to top it all off? They're also introducing barbershops... So that every other character can change their appearance. Sure... I've got a female rogue who has a nose ring I'd like to lose. But I never play her. I only rolled her because I was having such a hard time with them on my mage so I wanted to see what rogues could do. Well, that and open lockboxes... But I'm going to be doing instances again and I'm the tank. I'll be back to the same form I've had for years... Or maybe a polar bear.

Whoopie.

So here's what _I_ would like to see. That mark on the shoulder of bear form... How about that changes to whatever is on the tabard you had equipped when you went into bear form. So... When I'm tanking, maybe you'd see something like this:



It's a simple thing and it would allow druids some more choices for customization beyond brown or white. I'm just sayin'.

You _can_ go back again... But not for long

In 1999, I made a trip to Detroit to see Tiger Stadium before it was gone. I've never been a Tigers fan, nor have I ever really liked the pictures of the stadium but it had been around since 1912 and was a big part of baseball history. So I dragged two friends through Canada (the fastest way to get to Detroit from Vermont) and in 42 hours, we drove to Detroit, had some car trouble in Toronto rush hour traffic, stopped by Niagara Falls, caught a ball game from the right field porch and returned home.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not equating a World of Warcraft instance that, admittedly, few people ever saw, but the feelings I have about Naxxramas are similar. I only went there maybe 8 times pre-BC and we only ever downed 2 bosses but I have vivid memories of it. I remember grinding Argent Dawn rep for hours... There are a handful of mobs in the Eastern Plaguelands that give rep even at honored. I killed them by the hundreds. I bought my arcane crystals as soon as I learned that we were going to go to Naxxramas because I knew that 40-50 people trying to buy them at once would really drive up the price. When we finally got 40 people attuned, we went in and we wiped on Anub'Rekhan for hours. Three of them on a Sunday afternoon. We never got him past 55%.

But we kept plugging and plugging. We got the locust swarm transition down. We downed the adds faster. We learned the range of the spikes (it turns out that a fire mage can just stand there and not worry about the spikes... Max range is one yard outside their range). When someone died, we dropped everything to down the little scarabs. And then one week, we downed him. It probably took us 8 hours over 4 nights for our first kill. Then we moved on to the Instructor.

He was easier... We downed him in about our 9th attempt. He was easy mode. But I do remember a lot of talk beforehand about getting the priests to the spell hit cap so their mind control wouldn't be resisted. I remember running back and forth around that bannister to get out of line of sight of his shout. That's when things got complicated.

We never downed another boss in Naxxramas. We tried the other two bosses in the Spider wing but we couldn't keep the tank up through the stun on Maexxna and the adds always gave us trouble on Grand Widow Faerlina. So Naxx nights became two sets of trash clears to do the same two bosses over and over followed by repeated wipes on trash and two bosses that had our number and punctuated with a hefty repair bill - and this was before daily quests. If you were in epics, you had to spend a lot of time farming just to raid... And with 3 official and two unofficial raid nights a week, that didn't leave much time. We actually had one person get kicked out of the raid because he couldn't pay the repair bot.

So... On Naxx nights, people stopped showing up. Sure they were on for Blackwing Lair. We had that place on farm. We cleared it in 3 hours every week. They showed up for AQ40 because you were guaranteed a shot at a drop from at least 5 bosses... Then 6. Then 7. People even showed up for Molten Core. Sure it was a lot of alts and people were usually pretty drunk and there were only 33 of us, but we still killed Ragnaros every week. At one point, we had two full MC raids going a week... But Naxx? That died for Crucify.

And that made me sad. The four boss fights I'd seen were the most interesting, most challenging I'd seen save for Twin Emperors and C'thun. I'd always wanted to go back.

But now they're tearing it down....

Well... Not literally... They're repurposing it as the first level 80 raid in Wrath of the Lich King. They're making a 10 man version and a 25 man version and removing the 40 man, level 60 instance. I hear it has the same dimensions but it feels empty with just 10 people there. A lot of the mechanics are similar but it's lost it's epic feel.

That's why I was so pleased when I heard that a horde guild on my server was running Naxxramas every Saturday night... Of course, I wasn't attuned. Hell, none of my characters were even honored. So I took a Friday night and started doing the quests. I got my Barov Peasant Caller. I got my Argent Dawn trinket. I got the key to the city. I got to honored. Then I started running Strat Undead. I found that with some careful stealthing, minimal clearing and a LOT of really good gear, I could solo 45 minute Baron runs. With fragment turn-ins and with me getting all the scourgestones, I got to revered with Argent Dawn by 11 pm that night.... WAY faster than I thought I would. I bought a nexus crystal on the AH and bummed an arcane crystal (I already had one) from a friend I've done some favors for and waited. When the time came, the raid didn't happen. Another guild had poached a few raid members and they didn't have the numbers... That ended up being a really good night because I got my Champion of the Naaru title so it all worked out. That was two weeks ago.

On Friday, WoWinsider.com posted a rundown of the beta version of Naxx-10 and I started thinking about the old 40 man instance again. I went to the realm forums and the same people were hosting another Naxx run. On Saturday, It took me a few whispers but I got an invite. I was still resto from Arenas on Friday night so I went as a healer. We ended up with about 28 people, 4 of whom were at or around level 60.

I'll admit, it's a little less challenging with 24 level 70's but the some of the fights are still very interesting. We were a little light on DPS but we still overpowered the spider wing. We stomped Patchwerk and Grobbulus. We wiped a couple of times on Gluth but we finally figured it out. We didn't have the DPS for Thaddius but it was interesting to see where the mechanic for the first boss in Heroic Mech came from. We downed Razuvius pretty easily - with a player tanking him instead of MC'd adds. But we didn't have enough melee and tanks/healers for Gothik because people had left or gone to bed so we just cleared some trash in the plague wing to complete the first quest and we called it a night at about 1 am.

All told, we killed the two bosses who stopped Crucify cold and three I'd never seen before and I got to see two encouters I'd never seen before. The fights were so much fun. Very different from your typical tank and spank. I'm glad I went and I think I'll be going again... I may even try to recruit a friend.

Know your enemy: rogue

Alterac Valley weekend just ended and I'm pretty much burnt out. I spent the majority of the day yesterday on my Alliance mage grinding honor (It's crazy how fast the Alliance can get honor in AV) but I did do a few battlegrounds on my druid.

Alterac Valley is a big enough map that even with 40 people on each side, there are still significant opportunities for one on one combat. At one point, I did a few with a guild mate and he came to tower point to find me dueling a warrior and both of us under 1000 health. It was funny really. He was on _his_ druid so he topped me off and I said "I woulda had him".

What he _didn't_ see was the druid I found in cat form at 60% health and the rogue who caught _me_ in cat form before I could finish the other druid off. Both were long dead and the tower had still burned but the warrior and I were still going at it. My friend's druid is getting to be pretty well geared but he still seems to marvel at how easily I handle some classes. He shouldn't. There are some classes that a feral druid can absolutely school. Take, for example, rogues...

Rogues are leather wearing, sneaking around, stabbing you in the back, stun locking, running away if things don't go their way, good for nothing wastes of oxygen who can't heal themselves. I mean that. That said, they also seem to be intended to be chew toys for feral druids...

There are three basic ways an encounter with a rogue will start:

1) They are stealthed and get the jump on you.
2) You are stealthed and get the jump on them.
3) Neither of you are stealthed.

If you get the jump on a rogue, you want to open with a pounce. Not only does this give you a chance to front-load some damage, it puts a bleed on the rogue and bleeds will, eventually, pull a vanished rogue out of stealth and cannot be removed by Cloak of Skill. Furthermore, bleeds still do damage during Evasion. Then I like to follow with a rake and a rip (even if it's only a 2 combo point rip) and then drop into bear form before Pounce wears off. 'Tis better to leave combo points on a rogue than to be stunlocked in cat form.

For scenarios 1 and 3, you want to get into bear form as soon as possible... OK. Maybe you don't... But I do. You see... rogues are a crit happy, melee damage class. Bears are designed to soak up crits and melee damage with insanely high armor.

If you get caught in cat or caster form, you want to hit Barkskin. You can cast it while stunned or feared and it will help you ride out the initial stun and mash your "Rawr bear!!" button repeatedly.

Once I'm in bear form, I like to open with Feral Faerie Fire. Not only does it reduce their armor, but prevents them from going into stealth - and that's a major objective because rogues have a number of very annoying abilities while stealth. Vanishing during a fight is a large portion of a really good stunlock. As an added bonus, FFF will frequently get a rogue to burn cloak of skill.

After FFF, I like to use Mangle to do a mess of damage and to increase bleed damage and then Demoralizing Roar. Not because it does much but because it's annoying... And if I'm at half health or more and the rogue doesn't have any friends, I'm going to win... It's just going to take some time. I'm going to use this time to annoy the rogue.

At this point, you're just tanking the mob... I mean rogue... So next come the lacerates. I like to do two or three and then mangle again and hit FFF every now and then just to make sure it doesn't run out. If there's an enemy healer nearby who might help the rogue out... Pull the mob... I mean rogue... Around a corner or a long way away from the healer. You're going to want privacy for this...

If the rogue tries to run away, I'll Feral Charge them to catch up to them and root them. Maybe bash them if it's up and cyclone them during the bash. That should eat up most of the duration of the sprint. Or... If I know dash is up, I'll go cat form and use that - if we're outside, I'll catch up to him eventually... Or... If they're low on health, I'll moonfire spam the runners.

If things aren't going my way... There's Frenzied Regeneration. If I know I'm going to be using that soon, I'll stop using special attacks to to build up some rage and make sure I get the full benefit. I've got macros that allow me to cancel form, pop a health potion and a charged crystal focus and then drop back into bear form. It's instant cast - you just have to make sure that your global cooldown is up or you'll get caught in caster form. And then there's the classic bash and heal. You might, say, Bash and hit rejuvenation, Lifebloom and then drop into bear form. For extra style points, move away from the rogue while you're doing this. It will take them a couple of seconds to catch back up, giving your HoTs a chance to kick in.

Why does this work? Well... Feral Faerie Fire removes a lot of a rogues most damaging abilities and bleeds draw them out of stealth if they get out of FFF. Bear form increases your armor by 400% (~440% for a properly specced tanking druid) and PvP armor has insanely high amounts of armor (I use at least 3 pieces for every day tanking because it's so awesome) and the Merciless Gladiator's gear is available to everyone through battleground honor points. In all Merciless gear (with season 3 and 4 PvP gear thrown in), you should be pushing 20k armor - which would absorb 60-65% of melee damage coming in. PvP gear also has crazy amounts of agility which increases your chance to dodge (probably upwards of 25%) and increases your chance to crit... And when you crit, you get 4% of your health back (effect not happening more than once every 6 seconds)... And in bear form, your max health goes up by... My estimates put it at around 63% with the right talents. Which means you're healing for 4% of... A lot. It adds up.

I've used these techniques to solo a cheat death rogue with dual warglaives who got the drop on me _before_ the cheat death nerf. It was close but I think we both knew that he'd need some lucky procs to win... He didn't get them.

So... The next time you "encounter" a rogue, don't panic. Just tank them.

I Love It When A Plan Comes Together

I know I talk about PvP a lot, but I'd rather do PvE any day. I've seen all the PvE maps. There are only so many flags you can capture (by my estimates, I've capped the flag over 300 times in WSG on various characters). I've been working on the tier 4 title line. As of last night, I still had down Magtheridon and to run Heroic Slave Pens to turn in the quest to kill Nightbane and Gruul.

I'd spent a large portion of Friday night trying to get to revered with Argent Dawn (it turns out that I can solo a 45 minute Baron run because I can stealth large portions of it) so I could get a cheaper attunement for Naxxramas because I'd seen a PuG run advertised on the forums. The raid starting time came and went and none of the three toons who were the post said to contact were on at the time. So I decided to do my own thing. And... Wonder of wonders... Slave Pens was the daily heroic.

There were two groups looking for a tank and one of them had already downed the first boss. I looked up the person who was asking in the armory. He was a holy priest with 1900 healing. With my tanking stats, his healing and the relative easiness of the instance AND the fact that they'd already done one of the bosses promised a really quick run. So I whispered the priest and away we went.

I nubbed up one pull and I tried to pick up the sheep target (although some might argue that a good mage would never let a sheep break in the first place - frostbolt - frostbolt - sheep - frostbolt - frostbolt - sheep) when it got loose and hit it again after the mage had resheeped it. It was a MCing mob and I ended up killing the mage. We also had another wipe near the end but they were pretty easy going about it because their previous tank was really, really bad. But I did get to turn in my quest. Not only did I complete the quest but I picked up 4 quick badges and got two bag slots back. On the whole, it was a good night.

About 10 minutes after that instance was over, I got a tell from one of the leaders of Band of the Hawks asking me if I wanted to tank Mag. It's like he'd been watching over my shoulder. Hell yeah I did!!!

I've done one other Magtheridon PuG and it fell apart after about 3 attempts. I'll never understand who people can give up on a PuG raid after one attempt. It's a PuG people!!! Most of these people will never have seen the fights before. We're going to wipe a time or two... And these petulent people don't have the decency to leave the raid. Instead, they mysteriously disconnect immediately after the first wipe while everyone else is running back. I'll never understand that... But I digress... My point was that I'd never completed Magtheridon's Lair and now I was being asked to main tank it.

I also convinced his holiness, Pater, to join us as one of the five healers. He ended up dying on the first two trash pulls. Whoops... Good thing there are only 4 pulls total.

The first attempt was a pretty quick wipe while the clickers got things figured out. Then we had a good attempt. Then a huntard pulled early on the third attempt... That one ended pretty quickly... Although we did down the adds and get Mag to about 80%. We were having a little trouble timing the clicking of the cubes because Deadly Boss Mods seems to be a little off so a decision was made to pretty much eat the first blast wave to make sure we interrupt the majority of them.

By now it's getting close to midnight. Two people (which was strangely low... weird... No one was bailing on a PuG...) had to leave - including the person who formed the raid originally... An off tank who didn't have vent. We replaced them and made another attempt. By now we had 6 paladins... 3 tanks and 3 healers... I'm serious. We had EVERY pally buff.

I was tanking the third add and the boss. On the fourth attempt, a hunter died during the first two adds. After my add went down, I had a couple of seconds between my add going down and Magtheridon releasing so I battle rezzed the hunter. Normally, I wouldn't rez a non-tank/non-healer but I was the only druid and I was the main tank so I wouldn't have a chance to use it later.

This time felt different. The clicking was going well. Yeah... We took one blast wave but _only_ one. It was going well... But at 60% one of the clickers - a paladin healer - went down. But we communicated it and someone else took over their cube. We got to the cave-ins at 30%. The raid was weakened. A couple of people died. We lost Pater and another clicker. But we adjusted...

At about 8% everyone was OOM. There were no heals to be had and our casters weren't doing any damage any more. I got down to 4k health... It was looking bad. I've used my frenzied regeneration and my potion macro - so I had about 20 seconds left before I could use it again.

And then... Miracle! I got hit with a 15056 heal. A paladin hit me with a clutch lay on hands... Probably a tank from the size of it. We're back in it!!! Then another lay on hands... And another!!! We had 6 paladins in the raid and 5 were still up and they were chaining their one hour cooldown, instant cast, drains all their mana heals to get this done... 3%... Healers are regenerating a little mana. Heals are trickling in. 1%... Come on... Come on...

And... Finally... He was down. At the end, only about 14 people were still standing. I was below 30% health (that's still 6k with raid buffs though). All of the healers were under 500 mana. It was an absolutely epic fight. I'm sure that it was a first kill for 20 people in the raid so to have _that_ fight being your first... That's a fun memory. People were very excited.

We rezzed the dead (including Pater twice... Who managed to stand in a fire after he was rezzed). Loot was given out. Pater even got the 20 slot bag. He seemed happy. But not happy as I was...

I first went into Karazhan in October of last year... And that was on my paladin. Hiahotah didn't go into Karazhan until Arena season 3 started (because our then main tank repecced Boomkin) so I had to take over tanking... Which, incidentally, was when we really started having success in Karazhan...

But to get into Karazhan, we had to run Shadow Lab, Steam Vault, Arcatraz and Black Morass. It took us months to get to a point where we could down Shade of Aran and loot his book so we could move on in the quest line to get the urn to summon Nightbane. We did a heroic Shattered Halls without a paladin tank, without any CC and a paladin who had 27 point in prot healing because that was who was on. Then we did heroic Sethekk for someone's epic flight form quest. I'd already done mine, but I tanked it so I could do this quest and be able to summon Nightbane.

Then came the PuGs... Somewhere along the line - maybe in August of last year, I'd done the Cipher of Damnation quest line - including the 5 man group quest at the end - which unlocked the heroic dungeon "Trial of the Naaru" quest lines. We'd done Shattered Halls as a guild but that still left Steam Vault, Arcatraz and Shadow Labyrinth.

We tried heroic Steam Vault one day but couldn't finish because we had two healers and couldn't down the tanks on the last boss fast enough. I ended up helping a PuG once for that one. They skipped a lot of mobs by going along the right wall of the first area... But that led to a few wipes because you had to be careful about where you fought and where you got feared.

I did a PuG heroic Arcatraz. I remember that one going pretty well. For Shadow Lab, there was one day when a group was looking for a tank for one of the heroic Tempest Keep instances. But I only had Shadow Lab left for the Trial of the Naaru lines... They wanted to do a heroic and there were no other tanks on so they agreed to do Shadow Labyrinth. We wiped quite a bit to start. People went AFK for 5-10 minutes at a time. But... People stuck around and we found a rhythm. The priest didn't quite get that he had to be in the circle for the Murmur fight on heroic. So we wiped a couple of times. We actually got lucky and downed him on the second attempt - even though the priest hadn't learned.

All of this... Plus countless hours to get gear (including about 8 hours single pulling Mobs in Steam Vault to get my Earthwarden)... Numerous runs through Karazhan for badges... Culminated in this:



Hiahotah, Champion of the Naaru... I haven't been this excited about a title since Gifteye got to Lt. Commander. I've been pecking away at this for a year now. I've endured horrible, horrible PuGs (I've also met a few people who aren't horrible). Yeah... They nerfed Magtheridon... But I'm still ecstatic. Hell... I'm writing about it on a Sunday morning instead of doing dailies.

Plus... Now I don't feel like I should go for the "exalted with all battleground factions" title... At least... Not with Hiahotah...

Tarren Mill

I'd played almost exclusively Alliance until my guild broke up 2 months into Burning Crusade. I'd gotten a taste for doing instances and raiding so I wasn't going to go back to just doing the solo content and PvP by myself (I was as surprised as anyone to find out how social a game World of Warcraft is. It's not nearly as sad as I thought it would be) but I didn't want to start over with a new guild or PuG instances. I decided to pick up my horde character and level him to 70 so I could play with people I knew.

That was a year and a half ago. From time to time, people in my horde guild complained about the mean old Alliance who ganked them once or twice. I suggested in no uncertain terms that they level an Alliance toon to max level on a PvP server and get back to me. Oh man... Did that ever start a flame war... And the lynchpin of their argument was ALWAYS Tarren Mill. Tarren Mill this. Tarren Mill that. I would tell them that if they didn't like it, they could go somewhere else. Hell... There were still active quest I could pick up in the Barrens (horde territory) when I ran through there at 29. There were level 28 mobs there. If you didn't want to be ganked, you could go all the way to 30-31 without leaving a safe zone or going into an instance. It might take a little longer because you'd be grinding mobs instead of questing but it could be done.

It's not quite that simple on the Alliance side. The highest level mob I can think of in an Alliance territory is at most a level 18 or 19. There might be the odd level 20 or 21 out there but, for the most part, once you hit your 20's, you're out in contested territory. The first time I was ganked was at level 19 in Redridge Mountains. A level 20 rogue was patroling the road out of town to the south... Just camping lowbies and getting his jollies out. He was there for hours until a bunch of people banded together and started camping him.

That, at least, was plausible. However, it was not uncommon to see a raid of 6 or 7 level 60's one shotting lowbies from the roof of the inn there. And then there were the near daily raids on Darkshire - also frequently with people ganking lowbies from a roof. And the roving gank squads in Stranglethorn Vale (which I came to call Ganklethorn). Raids on Southshore. About 2 out of every 5 horde I saw jumped me all the way up to 60. The Netherwind Regalia was, at the time, the WoW equivalent of red markings on a snake... But even then, I still got jumped from time to time. Mostly I blinked or sheeped and ran away (a skill that came in very handy in Warsong Gulch) but after I started getting crazy gear I got a little bolder.

Don't get me wrong, the Alliance was guilty of this to a certain extent (hell... I have over 21k HKs on my Alliance mage and a good solid 300-500 of those came outside of battlegrounds (what can I say... Crucify would sometimes delay raids if there were horde between Cenarion Hold and Ahn'Qiraj)) but it never seemed like it was as mean or as organized. It _seems_ (and this may not be the case, but that's certainly how it appears) that the horde attracts a certain type who identifies with the evil/darker side and they take it seriously. When I started making my first passes through Ganklethorn on the horde side, you'd see it in general chat: "Let's kill/rape/murder these fuckers/assholes/pussies" (Hell... People in my guild have said as much in guild chat) or "Let's form a raid on Darkshire" were things you'd see almost daily. People frequently come into a zone and ask in general "Any Alliance around?".... OK... Not 'Alliance'. They call them 'allies'. It seems derogative when they say it. These were things I've never seen once on the Alliance side. Maybe it's the culture of the servers I'm on and a sample size of two isn't large enough but the general rule is: That nice Alliance character is going to leave you alone or even help you if you get in trouble. That horde is going to kill you as soon as you pull more than one mob or you let your health or mana drop below 50%. Count on it.

I've actually bailed a horde who made an ugly three pull out and gotten myself in trouble and had them kill me because I was vulnerable.

Over the last year and a half, I've leveled 3 toons to 70 and one to 50. The level 50 has been ganked a total of maybe 5 times. These four characters (including a mage) have been attacked fewer times total than my Alliance mage was ganked sucessfully in just over a year. They've never been camped and they've only run into 4 or 5 raids on horde outposts - most of which were easily broken up by a single feral druid.

With the coming of WotLK, there's no real point on working on my horde 70's. At best, they'll get incremental upgrades for several hours of work. So I've been working on my Alliance mage a little. Mostly grinding his SSO rep to exalted for the neck piece. In three days on Isle of Quel'Danas, I've been ganked 5 or 6 times and people have made another 10 or so attempts. I've been ganked by a warlock, a shadow priest, a rogue and a hunter. I've been camped by a shadow priest and a hunter... Which is one thing... But...

The hunter was a total asshat about it. I mean... You can usually tell from the names. Anyone with blood, death, kill or the like (also anyone with a name that replaces and 'er' with 'a' like 'playa' or 'killa') is going to be an asshat. In this case, the huntard's name was Hulkamania. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that this guy was looking for a fight... But one he already knew the outcome of. So let's run through the sequence:

1) I pull a warlock and his imp right next to the "second" quest hut in IoQD. Huntard shoots me in the back (as is their way) and kills me.
2) I run back to my corpse and wait for the huntard to get bored, mount up and ride away far enough away that I could rez and get back to "relative" safety.
3) I rez. Run to safety. Huntard shoots me and continues doing so as I run around the building.
4) Huntard gets killed by guards.
5) I pick a slightly different location and start to pull again. Huntard comes back and shoots me in the back... Again.
6) But this time I get away... And get back to the guards again.
7) I sit down in the doorway to the second quest hut and eat and drink while surrounded by about 8 guards.
8) Huntard finds me and sits outside the doorway on his mount waiting for me to come out.
9) I sit there.
10) Huntard starts saying something in /say. I assume it's insulting. I assume it's something along the lines of "come out and fight" when he really means "come out and let me shoot you in the back again because you're an undergeared mage and I haven't gotten enough jollies off of you yet".
11) I sit there.
12) Huntard does a /spit
13) I sit there.
14) Huntard says a bunch more things.
15) I sit there.
16) Huntard rides off.
17) Huntard rides back 12 seconds later like, somehow, I was fooled by him riding off.
18) I sit there.

After about 3 more minutes he finally runs off. Time out of my day... Eh... I had left work at 10:30 because I wasn't feeling well, so this was bonus time and there was good stuff on the TV so nothing really. But it was 10 minutes when I wasn't plowing through dailies. So I did the two bombing quests because I'd be safe for a few minutes and he'd have found a new victim.

But it does make me wonder what is wrong with his medula oblongata that he'd spend 10 minutes trying to grief me and then act all mad at _me_ when I wouldn't grant him the satisfaction. Is he a bully? Was he bullied in school so he gets his ya-yas out by picking on people in a digital world? Does he just have a small epeen in real life?

Don't get me wrong... I ganked people before. Those who really deserved it by griefing me (or others) multiple times were camped. There was one time when a hunter ganked my mage a couple of times and when I couldn't find him again, I killed everything that moved in the Arathi Highlands - I'm talking players and, well, pretty much all of Refuge Point (I was pissed... He must have /spit on my corpse. I have no patience for that kind of behavior) in an effort to call him out. But I have never, ever once in my life gotten pissed at someone who had done nothing to me other than deny me a chance to gank them a second time.

But my point... My point... There _was_ a point, right? Oh yeah. Yes. Tarren Mill can be bad. Boo. Hoo. At least the horde can avoid Tarren Mill (or... Just go there on weekend mornings or early in the evening before it gets bad. The Alliance can't avoid... Umm... Pretty much everything. You just have to know that there's an undead rogue, a hunter or a warlock out there somewhere just waiting for you to pull three mobs at half health. So... Stop whining about Tarren Mill until you've seen how the other half lives and can honestly say it's not ten times worse. Seriously... I'll wait.

Level 1 N00b

The first... The absolute very first character I ever rolled on the day I installed the game over two and a half years ago was a troll hunter. I don't remember what server it was on or what his name was but I have a distinct recollection of shooting stuff with a bow. I had no idea about mob levels were. I had no idea that the mob text color was significant. I had no idea about being PvP flagged. I was a level 1 n00b.

I did a few quests with him and started poking around and I could kill pretty much everything. I still wasn't quite sure what was going on. Sometimes I could shoot stuff with my bow and sometimes I couldn't. But I was getting along.

One of the quests sent me to the southern end of starting troll/orc zone. I found something called "The Hidden Path". Which took me out over a bay... With a boat. I don't know if I fell in or climbed down but I found myself swimming along the bottom and investigating a sunken boat. And then there was a dock. There was some stuff that I could shoot so I shot it and boy howdy did it kill me. Again and again. I finally couldn't even move out of the water. I got so frustrated I just deleted the character (that and I didn't really like the play style and I didn't like the starting area one bit. It was sandy and boring).

Last night I had to turn in a quest in the second quest hub and I thought about that character. I explored a little and found the Hidden Path and looked out over the ocean on the other side. It turns out that area I had found was Booty Bay. I'd probably been shooting the neutral dock guards.

I've done a lot of things in this game: I've leveled 5 characters to 70, raided Molten Core, Blackwing Lair, AQ40, Naxx, Karazhan, Gruul's Lair and dipped my foot into Zul'Aman, I got to rank 10 in the old PvP ranking system AND held down a full time job AND trained for triathlon. I've tanked. I've healed. I've done ranged damage. There hasn't been a calendar day in the last 2.5 years that I haven't logged on for at least 5 minutes... But I almost packed it away on that first day because it was too confusing.

But here's the thing... That wasn't the last time I felt like a complete and total noob. I didn't use fireblast until I was about level 37 because it did less damage than other fire spells I had. Then I was questing with another mage and he was walloping the mobs with "something" but I couldn't see him casting it. That was the day I learned about instant cast spells. Then there was the time I fell for a hunter's feign death. It wasn't the last time but none of the times since have been even close to how noobish I felt when I thought I'd killed him and he shot me in the back when I engaged another mob. And then one day, I found the auction house... This list of noobish things I've done goes on and on and on.

Fast forward to... This morning and I was going to cook some fish on the bonfire by the Consortium guys who give out the daily dungeon quests. I have been holding onto a heroic quest so I went to check what the daily quest was... The daily quest was for Arcatraz to kill some of the Sentinels... Now I pass those guys a few times a day and I had never noticed that not only do the images in the projectors next to the quest givers change - but they change to the quest mobs they want you to go after.

N00b.

The Axis of Asshattery

In WoW, there are certain classes (and one spec) that seem to lend themselves to asshattery and/or their abilities and playstyles attract asshats - particularly on PvP servers. I call it the Axis of Asshattery. Now don't get me wrong... I can be an asshat myself (it takes one to know one) but I'm usually not mean about it. I'll give you a little "How do you do" gank if I see someone whose name, guild name, race or class bothers me but I'll leave you alone if you don't seem like you're likely to bother someone when you get to 70. Classes near the top of the Axis, however, tend to take things to the extreme. Take our A number 1 asshats of all time...

1) rogues: The granddaddies of all that is asshat. With the ability to stealth and talents/abilities like Cheap Shot, Backstab, Malice, Remorseless Attacks, Dirty Tricks, Ambush, Dirty Deeds, etc. and the 45 abilities they have to allow them to attack you but you can't fight back (not to mention the various abilities to slink away when a fight isn't going their way - Evasion, Blind, Sprint, Vanish, Cheat Death) the rogue class seems to have been designed to appeal to the maladjusted and built for griefing. To this day, I still cringe when I hear the stealthing noise. After my mage started getting PvE epics, he started killing every single horde rogue he saw - no matter what level they were and what they were doing. They ate a pyroblast. And back then, it seemed like 95% of rogues were undead - so a LOT of undead ate it because they were guilty by association. I even rolled a rogue and ran her up to 51 just to see what rogues had in their arsenal and what I could do to combat them.

On the Asshat scale, they score a perfect 13 out of 13. The only good rogue is a dead rogue. I loathe them so much I can't bring myself to type the word with an uppercase R... Even if it starts a sentence. When I speak the word, you can feel the distaste. It is my firm belief that every single person who has played a rogue to max level was beaten as a child... And they probably had it coming.

2) Warlocks: Between the 17 fears they have and DoTs and pets and the dark, evil gear... Warlocks seem to bring out the asshats as well. While they don't have the myriad evasive abilities of rogue, they do have capability to fight you when you are not able to fight back... Or they can hit you with DoTs and run away - killing you without you being able to do anything about it. I have a twink warlock and I have a macro that cycles through three different DoTs with each push. Target someone. Push the button three times. Target someone else. Repeat. (The difference being that I only do that in the battlegrounds where people _know_ they're about to PvP.) Plus they have a pet to augment their damage or keep you from getting out of combat while they attack someone else.

Asshat Scale rating: 10 out of 13.

3) Shadow Priests: Feel the power of the dark side. I don't know that there's anything in particular about the abilities of a shadow priest that promotes asshattery, but... I've seen a lot of asshat shadow priests. Maybe it's the ability to silence and fear. Maybe it's word 'shadow' that denotes evil.

Asshat scale rating: 9 of 13

4) Huntards: Shoot you in the back and run away. Drag you though those annoying slowing traps while they plunk away... And those godawful flips that the night elves do. Apparently you can't fire a gun or a bow without jumping. And then when they get in trouble, they feign death so you have to stop and retarget them. Not to mention their pets (I may talk about this at length later but there is never a time when it isn't funny to sheep or hibernate a hunter's pet) - a second source of DPS and all around nuisance.

Asshat scale rating: 8.5 of 13

5) Warritards: Maybe it's just me, but the warrior class seems to attract unthinking brutes. I'm not saying they all are... But of the unthinking brutes that I know who play the game, their main is a warriror. Let me put it another way... My female blood elf mage once taunted a warrior in Shadowmoon Valley (who was being camped by a gnome mage at the time) by saying "I am a warrior. I will smash you with my giant epeen. Do you see how large my epeen is? Look at my glorious epeen!!!". I guess I'm implying that maybe some of them have inadequecy issues. I've been lucky in that my three favorite classes can handle most warriors pretty easily. Doesn't stop them from trying though... Like the time when my aforementioned mage sheep-kited a level 70 warrior a third of the way across Hellfire Peninsula to the safety of Thrallmar. He kept coming... And was killed by the guards.

Asshat scale rating: 8 of 13

6) Shaman: Mostly harmless now... But back in the day I used to get really excited when I killed a shaman in a battleground. They were mean. Most of their score is from Pre-BC. But they can still do a lot of damage while still being mobile... And those grounding and earthbind totems... Grrr.

Asshat scale rating: 6 of 13

7) Mages: Don't get me wrong, I love mages. I have two level 70 mages and raided up to Naxx on one but... They're cloth wearing wimps who have to stand still to really hurt you. You have to pick and choose your fights. But a well timed pyroblast to a rogue who's fighting three mobs? Good stuff. Or sheeping a hunter's pet when the pet is tanking an elite. That's just good clean fun. But on the whole, mages have to be careful - even with warriors now.

Asshat scale rating: 4 of 13

8) Druids: Druids are earth mother loving sweethearts. Seriously. We are. Just ask us. We'll tell you. But they can stealth and a feral druid with good gear can hurt you. As can a boomkin. Resto druids can... Umm.. Heal themselves until you die of boredom. But on the whole, they (we) aren't going to start anything with you... Plus, we're likely to run away.

Asshat scale rating: 3 of 13

9) Non-shadow Priests: Squishy, meek healers... They tend to be polite and not start anything unless they have a rogue or warrior with them. Hell... They'd probably hold the door open if you had your hands full. But they do have a fear...

Asshat scale rating: 1.5 of 13

10) Paladins: Defenders of the light. Many of them take that seriously. Even I behave differently when I'm on my paladin. I help old ladies across streets. I get kittens down from trees. I heal mages who made a bad pull and send them on their way with a friendly blessing of wisdom. Two of the three paladin specs aren't ever going to kill anything (except rogues and warriors). And so even if you do start to fight them, they'll probably just bubble and hearth... And get their druid... I'm just sayin'...

Asshat scale rating: 0.5 of 13

Which brings me back to yesterday... So there I was just minding my own business and questing on my (shadow) priest in Tanaris. I was working on the four quests in the pirate cove when some shouts went up in general chat about an Alliance rogue and warlock ganking people there and had been doing so for an hour. "Maybe the won't bother me" I thought. "Live and let live. Not my problem." I said... Until the warlock hit me with two DoTs while I was riding away from him and killed me.

Oh... It is ON!!!

I logged out immediately (OK... Not immediately... That 20 seconds is agonizing when I need to improve someone's socialization skills) and logged onto Hiahotah. Checked in at the bank to pick up my PvP set and went off to the World's End Tavern... Man... That teleport to the Caverns of Time sure is handy.

When I got there, the rogue and warlock were dispatching a level 70 rogue who showed up to help. I got a pounce, rake, mangle and a 5 point Rip off on the warlock before he realized what was happening and feared me. Didn't matter... He was dead already. Then I moved onto the rogue... Who I fought in cat form until he realized what was killing him. Then I just switched to bear form and tanked him. Rawr. Dead. It was over in less than 20 seconds.

Now normally, I don't corpse camp people. But not only were these guys ganking people AND being mean about it... They were also representing spots 1 and 2 in the Axis of Asshattery. So the 70 horde rogue and I camped them... And killed them 4 more times each. In the interim, all of the lowbies finished up their quests and left the area... As did the 70 horde rogue. But I wasn't _quite_ finished with them. I hadn't gotten my chance to quest and I wanted to show them that they didn't want to be there any more.

So I stealthed on top of that hill just to the left of the entrance to the shipyard. You know the one... Which, coincidentally (or not... Maybe they could see me while they were dead), was where they rezzed. The rogue stunned me before I got him and the warlock got off a fear. It was not my finest moment. But I'm a _good_ druid. You see... I always know where the water is.

I left them with some wounds to worry about and made for the ocean. Dropped a couple of HoTs on myself and removed Curse of Agony on my way in. I dropped below 500 health at one point before the HoTs kicked in. Once I hit the water, I hit Aquatic form and went for deep water on the other side of the boats. Every time rejuvenation wore off, I'd refresh it and hit swim form again... And the warlock kept coming. After I got to 5k health I hit one more rejuvenation and a lifebloom, dropped into cat form and stealthed. CRAZY IVAN!!!

The warlock started swimming away backward... Which is about the same speed I swam forward while stealthed. He clearly hadn't bandaged or eaten so he was still low on health from rezzing and the earlier portion of this round. It wasn't until he stopped to summon a pet that I caught up to him. Splat. Of course, his rogue buddy was lurking around and he started beating on me. His stun broke and I got into bear form... Game over.

I swam back to shore. Topped myself off stealthed near my priest's body and went to make dinner. I'd proved my point (Which was twofold: 1) no matter how well geared you are, there's always someone who can kick your ass and 2) don't mess with the alts of people who have mains who can stealth) and all the lowbies had left. I figured they'd look for me for a couple of minutes and leave because their fun was over. And sure enough... When I came back a half hour later, I had the place to myself. Plus I had 12 more HK's, 200+ honor points and a smug smile on my face because the Axis of Asshattery had been taken down a notch.