Unexpected WoWeekend

We’d planned on traveling this weekend, but are postponing our trip due to the amount of snow that was on the ground this morning and that is continuing to fall. After bracing myself for a completely WoW-less weekend, looks like I have quite a bit of playtime in front of me. All our chores are done, apartment is totally clean, laundry is finished, etc… so…*cracks her knuckles*

I’m hoping we’ll be taking our pally/shaman duo out for some Outland adventures. We’ve hardly played them since we got there, so we have a lot of rested XP built up.

I really need to get my pugging mage to BFD again. I have neglected her for too long! (Well, actually, she’s seen quite a bit of the battlegrounds this past week, but that was not my intention for that character, originally.) I’ve been in the LFG, but I admit I haven’t been as persistent in looking for groups as I have been in the past. (At this rate it will be years, not “year” of the pug.) I’ll make an effort this weekend to get her into at least one pug if not two.

Last night, I spent a little time leveling my frost mage, who is officially my “main” as far as my guild is concerned. I’ve seen a lot of definitions for that term, but the one that applies here is that it’s the name folks call me when I login, regardless of what character I’m on. She’s not the highest level character I have, I don’t play her the most, and I don’t know that she’ll the one I’ll ultimately progress furthest with. But, I digress… point is, I really would like to get her to Outland soon. She really is fun to play.

I might also mess around with some Alliance alts. I did roll on that new server I mentioned yesterday, but I didn’t even last 30 minutes in the starting area before I got irritated with people. At first the novelty of it was appealing — so many people! So many corpses! I was amazed that things respawned fast enough for anyone to get anything done. Perhaps my biggest mistake was not immediately logging out of the General Chat like I normally do. There was so. Much. Idiocy. One idiot in particular… argh. That plus the difficulty of finding mobs to kill and people sniping mobs from each other.  I was just done with it. I may have even deleted the toon… I can’t even remember. In any case, I might try again there in a few weeks after people settle down. In the meantime, I think I’ll set up my little Alliance family elsewhere. I’m thinking Drenden since I already have a (gnaked) gnome there in Shattrath. 🙂

Speaking of the new server (Cairne), check out Brave New Realm, a blog from the point of view of a relatively new WoW player who has decided to set up shop there and chronicle his experiences as the realm develops. Good stuff!

Finally, I did start that Orc rogue I was daydreaming about. She’s level 5 or so, and has just made her way to Durotar. She is fun so far, and running up to the mob for some stabby stabby has been a nice change of pace since most of my characters are ranged attackers. The play mechanic is similar to the assassin in Diablo II, too, which was one of my favorite classes in that game.

Tempting

Verrrrrry tempting.

I’m a Horde-y at heart, but thinking about some recreational Alliance alts. Maybe on that server?

😀

Edit: It is too crowded and annoying in the starting areas. As interesting as dealing with a new server economy might be, I’ll choose a different server for that Alliance alt.

The Purple Poxing Has Begun!

Last night, the Purple Poxer team set out from Orgrimmar for their first adventures together. We all logged in around 7pm, and after some greetings, buffing, and brief planning, we left the safety of the city for the wilds of Durotar.

Lookie! Our first kill!

The “wilds” of Durotar were no match for us. We obliterated every scorpion, boar, quillboar, and pirate in our path. Our lovely tank, Harisan, took to gathering up bunches of them at once to sharpen our group skills. After completing a few Razor Hill quests, we decided to move on to the Barrens for greater challenges (and flightpaths).

Here’s our fearless healer Daxe leading the “lazy train” through the Barrens.

As we made our way from the Crossroads to Camp Taurajo, we challenged ourselves with successively higher level mobs. We managed to kill each one in turn, and were feeling pretty powerful. We did get sneaked up on by a centaur and his pet while we were killing a hyena, and unfortunately, Daxe got squished. I had spent so much mana on moonfires (that were resisted! bah!) that I didn’t have the mana to heal Daxe or anyone else after Daxe died. This was a good reminder that I should conserve some mana in the future for the tougher battles (though chances are, I’ll have plenty saved, because I plan on being feral).

After picking up the flight path in Camp Taurajo, we continued to Thunder Bluff so I could grab the quest chain for getting bear form. /train

On the way, Salindiar blasted a group of deer crossing the road with a frost nova, and they all collapsed simultaneously in heaps of ruined leather scraps. Very funny. So, next time we saw a group, he did it again:

Hee hee hee!

The rest of the gang messed around in Thunder Bluff while I spoke with my trainer and traveled to Moonglade to meet with the Bear Spirit. Daxe provided folks with some enchants, and Harisan must have been enchanting, too, because I heard that she had a suitor!! /rumor /eyebrow waggle

After I returned to meet with my trainer, we all flew back to Camp Taurajo to kill the moonkin thing for my quest. We destroyed it (of course), and on the way back to Camp T, we saw a level 20 thunder lizard… we couldnt resist trying to take it down. Harisan tanked while we all lobbed our pathetic spells at the beast, most of which were resisted. We did finally kill it though. Unfortunately, I was three points short of being able to skin it! Booo….

This is me returning to Thunder Bluff after completing the kill for the class quest. I love Mulgore!

All the Poxers came to Elder Rise with me so I could turn in my class quest, and we celebrated my first moments of Bear form with a dance! Woohooo!

Next, we continued on to the Crossroads for a quick quest turn in, and then proceeded to Orgrimmar. It really was lovely weather for flying.

We visited Thrall in his chambers. Patient as ever, he sat through a group photo shoot with us, and we tried not to be too star struck. For the HORDE!

We got the “Hidden Enemies” quest from Thrall, and then spent quite a bit of time in the caves east of Orgrimmar shaking down evil Orcs to get their Lieutenant’s Insignias. As usual, not many were carrying them, so it took quite a while to get one for each of us. While in the cave, Waradwenne got the tablet she needed for her warlock class quest. We also ran into and killed Gazz’uz about four or five times. Poor sucker. I’m surprised he didn’t start running away from us.

After turning in the Insignias, we only had about 30 minutes of adventuring left, so we decided to spent them in Ragefire Chasm, practicing some pulls. Daxe was hopping with excitement!

Inside RFC, I thought we did great. Our collective aggro radius was pretty huge given that we were all level 11 or 12, but we managed to initiate the pulls fairly deliberately. Daxe marked the pulls for us, and I thought we worked really well as a team. I was in bear form so I could contribute a bit more DPS, and I felt like I controlled my threat reasonably well. There were a couple times when I noticed I was taking a lot of damage, but generally I had good luck if I stepped back, let Harisan get in a few good swings, and avoided using my higher damage moves for a few attacks.

We did some pulls of two and three, and started to get our groove. We managed to kill all the Troggs we needed for one of the RFC quests, so we’ll all get some nice XP from turning that one in. At 10pm, it was bedtime for Purple Poxers, so we trudged out of the instance and said our goodbyes for the night. It was so much fun, I can’t wait until next week!!

Experimental Conclusions from Week 1

– Although collection quests are still entertaining because 1) we’re together, and 2) we’re positively steamrolling the opposition, they do take a lot of time. Since we have limited playtime, we may consider skipping a lot of these unless the rewards are really good. The ones in instances will be different because we may run these more than once, but the ones on the outside may not be worth it.

– The kill-ten-of-these-and-ten-of-those types of quests will be well worth our time. Poxic Steamroller FTW!

– For me, I feel like instances are really “where it’s at.” We only made it down the first path in RFC, but it was SO much fun. If folks just wanted to run instances over and over, this would be perfectly fine with me. 🙂

– We used the in-game voice chat during all our questing, though only Daxe, Wara, and I had our mics going this week. This is the first time I’ve played using voice instead of typing for any length of time, and it was pretty interesting. Speaking is definitely quicker than typing, though it does remove some of the immersiveness of the game experience. The quality of the voice chat coming through did seem to vary, too, from person to person. I had to have my mic fairly close to my face for people to hear me and it actually hit me in the nose a few times, so I can only imagine how nasal I sounded. Ventrilo does have better quality, so if using some kind of voice chat is popular amongst all the teams, it might be worth our while to try to get a server (or rent some server space) for the Poxers eventually. I’d chip in for this.

Overall conclusion: FUN!!! 😀

Other posts about the Purple Poxers’ adventures:

Purple (PWNING) Poxers

Thrall is Thrilled

Purple Poxers FTW!

Purple Poxic Roshomon

Reader’s Poll: Best Class for Farming?

Yesterday I was listening to one of the latest World of Warcast podcasts (not the latest one in the blog there — looks like that hasn’t been updated since last year), and one thing that Starman mentioned was that in his experience, if one is looking to make money, their time is better spent gathering and farming than doing the daily quests. In addition to whatever you’re intentionally collecting, there’s always the chance you’ll pick up something rare, an item, a gem, or something that is worth much more than what the dailies reward.

Some people hate farming, I know, and so it’s nice that the dailies offer an alternative for some steady cash. I’ve had to do a fair bit of mining recently for my paladin’s blacksmithing quests, and I actually found it to be fairly relaxing. This is probably good because I have a mighty army of alts to feed and take care of, many of whom will do their own farming, but after some point, I may designate one of my toons to be The Farmer that will be the major breadwinner. But which one?

I’ve done a bit of searching around, and the opinions are wide and varied on which class is the best for this sort of thing. Certainly some of it depends on what you’re farming, and of course player skill will also make a big difference.

What class do you think makes the best farmers? Most efficient? Most versatile? Most enjoyable? I’d love to hear your opinions on this.

Search Terms

I was just looking at the search terms that brought folks to this blog, and for yesterday, I see:

“outland bound”	2
rogue outland level	1
leveling holy paladin outland	1
outland instances names	1
outland bound	1
wow flooding auction house	1
bound up in dungeon	1

Heh. I’ll bet that last person was disappointed.

Resolution achieved!

Last night I logged into my hunter briefly, sifted through her inventory a bit, and then decided to park her in the inn again, as I’ve been playing her quite a lot. Mr. Ess didn’t feel like playing our duo, so I logged into my priest for a while. She had a lot of stuff to disenchant, so I took care of all of it, and then switched over to my mage (my “main” — har har). My mage was in Tanaris, although most of the quests there are now “low level” for her. I still thought I’d get some decent XP from the turn ins, plus the kills would be quick, so she wandered over to hassle pirates for a few minutes… and then got bored. Huh, bored? Sooo, I logged into my pug mage to look for BFD group. No dice. For a moment, I thought I might have a Gnomeregan group (of all things), but it fell through…

My pug mage was in Thunder Bluff, fishing while in the LFG, and as I was realizing I wasn’t going to find a pug, I noted the Warsong Gulch battlemaster across the pond. Hm... So, I did it. I put myself in the queue to join the next available group for a round of capture the flag against the Alliance. 🙂

At only level 24, I knew there wasn’t much I’d be able to contribute in terms of DPS, especially against a bunch of level 29 twinks. Plus I didn’t really know the map, and I don’t know the mechanics of dealing with the flags, not to mention that my only PvP experience thus far has been a few rounds of dueling with my guildmates. But, what the heck… I decided to jump in with both feet. Since this toon wasn’t in any way connected with my main toons or my guild, reputations would not be damaged much if I totally stank it up in there.

Within about two minutes, I was added to a raid and entering the battleground. There was nobody in the little starting area, and after subsequent matches, I realized I must have been a mid-game replacement of someone who quit (or maybe a late addition). This first match was all kind of a blur… I generally followed the strategy I use when I’m in regular groups and the mobs aren’t being marked. I tried to stay off to the sides of battle and potshot whoever was already taking the most damage. I had no idea who had the flag or where the flags were, but I was certain that I wouldn’t need to be a flag carrier anyway. Doesn’t seem that mages five levels below the cap would be good candidates for that. 🙂

Almost everyone else in the BG was level 29, though I did see a 26 on the Alliance team, and I went after them as much as I good. Our team also had a level 22 warlock, and they probably got squished more times than I did. I died a lot, but ultimately, I did get some kills in, and it was really fun. At one point, I was skirting the group that was battling it out, and went up to some trees. Apparently there was a level 29 rogue hiding in there, and they killed me in like one stab. It was hilarious.

The Horde lost the battle. I wasn’t surprised to see myself at the bottom of the scorecard in terms of total damage done, but I was surprised to see that I didn’t have the least number of kills. Go me! I jumped in the queue for another match immediately.

I had a slightly better feel for what I was supposed to be doing during the second go. As a squishy, I knew I’d be best off sticking with other people, too, so whenever I died, I stood in the graveyard a sec to see if anyone else appeared so we could run out together. I spent a lot of time hanging with a druid who healed me several times and saved my butt when the Alliance hunter’s pig was trying to eat my face. We ended up making a pretty good team and killed a few rogues together. In this second match, the Horde was triumphant! For the HORDE!

Since the queue times were so short, I went into Warsong Gulch a third time, eager to apply what I’d learned from the previous runs. Again, I tried to stick with a small group of people and not wander off on my own. I ended up protecting the flag carrier for a bit, and got some nice kills in when the Alliance came after her. Ultimately, we were overpowered, however, and lost. Still, much fun.

First impressions… good times. I didn’t mind losing, I didn’t mind dying, and when someone killed me in a surprising way (by being sneaky or just killing me in one shot) I thought it was pretty funny. It was also clear that any type of teamwork gives a huge advantage. Because of this, I was a bit surprised at how little communication there was, but I suppose there wasn’t much time for it. Everything seemed to happen so fast. (I was tuned into the in game voice chat, but nobody was using it.)

After getting my feet wet in Warsong Gulch, I decided to make my way to Arathi Basin. The queue times for AB were longer, with the average wait around 10 minutes when I first joined up. I tabbed out while I waited, studied some maps I found online, and read about the objectives. And then into battle I went, once again…

This time, someone did step up and take charge, and said for a team to run up to the lumbermill. Although I’d just looked at the map, my terrible sense of direction made me unsure where that was, so I just followed a small group of people and ended up there. Woo! We took the node successfully and didn’t get challenged for several minutes. The Horde took two nodes right away and seemed to be battling for the third one. The Alliance only had one node for most of this time, so this gave us a good head start on them.

Alliance did come up and challenge us at the lumbermill, but they seemed to be coming up one at a time. We’d run over, squish the the intruder, and then that would be that. For the most part, I lingered off by the mill itself, but I noticed the other two folks guarding the node favoring the right path up the hill, so I eventually wandered over to keep an eye on the left path. I did catch someone coming up and hit them with a frost bolt, and then ran back toward the node to get the attention of the others guarding it. We all unleashed our DPS on the poor dude… hee hee hee.

We got control over that third node, but then lost it to even things to 2-2. We were then called to help defend the farm, and so I ran there (from the graveyard, as I recall), and a shaman and I guarded the node together. He had totems up all around it, and one of them exploded when a rogue approached. I immobilized them with a frost nova and then we destroyed them. It was awesome. (Maybe I am a PvPer after all?) The Horde won, we all congratulated one another.

By this time, I was addicted. Must… queue… again. The queue time was estimated to be 12 minutes, but it was a full 15 minutes before I was back in Arathi Basin. It was starting to get late, but I wanted one more run…

I’m not sure how long the previous match took, but this second one was over in about 2 minutes. Literally. I ran up to the lumbermill just like the time before, and we seized control of it for about 5 seconds before there were 5 Alliance there taking it back. We never got a foothold. “They’re trying to 5 cap us,” someone said. And they did… Alliance took all five nodes, and had 2000 resources before we even had 200. It was a complete and total smackdown. Daaaamn.

So, of course I wanted to go in there one more time! I queued again (queue time now up to 16 minutes), and went to UC to see if I could do any training. Much to my embarassment, it looked like I hadn’t been to the trainer in a really, really long time. (Oops. That would explain why my DPS was so crappy in that recent BFD run.) I trained in everything possible, and then hung around UC for a few minutes. I tabbed out to check my e-mail at one point and the game crashed! Noooo! It was about 12 minutes into my wait, too… bah. By this time, it was midnight, so I decided I’d better be off to bed…

… where I dreamt of an Orc rogue alt. Hmmmmmmmmmmmm… 🙂

Resolution achieved. I have dipped my toe into one of the PvP parts of WoW, and I think it’s super fun. (I do like green eggs and ham!)

Outlandish Weekend

Another of my characters has now made it to Outland! Our pally/shaman duo finished off a bunch of Felwood and Winterspring quests on Friday night, and hit 57. On Sunday, we made a sprint toward 58 by finishing up Winterspring and doing a bit of the Videre Elixir quest line from Un’Goro. My hunter skipped much of that one, but turns out the XP was pretty good for just doing a bunch of running around. We hit 58 in the early evening, and made our way to the Dark Portal. This was my husband’s first character to get to Outland, so we lingered outside a few minutes, took a few screenshots, and enjoyed the moment.

Once we messed around with the Thrallmar quests for a little while, we decided to see if we could make it to Shattrath (since it’s a very nice place to have a hearthstone!). We buffed up and made the dangerous run through Hellfire Peninsula and Zangarmarsh to Terrokar. Actually, the only time we really felt we were in danger was between Hellfire and Zangarmarsh, as the ravagers were quite interested in us thanks to our large aggro radii. We didn’t have to stop and fight though, so all was well. We arrived at Shattrath safely.

Once we got there, we milled around a bit, and I showed Mr. Ess where the portals were. We haven’t decided on Aldor vs. Scryer yet, though we’d like to choose the same faction so we can continue question together until 70. Since we couldn’t choose a faction until 60 anyway, we somewhat arbitrarily chose the Aldor faction’s inn for our home. (My hunter is Aldor and I’m familiar with where the inn is, so I could lead us right there.) We took the lift up to Aldor Rise, approached the inn, and … I got attacked. A bunch of the Aldors ran up to me, trapped me, and EXILED me from the city. I appeared just outside Shattrath, and for the next 3 minutes, I had an exile debuff. Great. Me and Griftah down by the schoolyard.

<—noob

Mr. Ess talked with an NPC while he was waiting for me and got the “you are neutral with the Sha’tar” message. Gah. So, maybe this wouldn’t have happened if I’d talked with someone first? I went up there again, and all the Aldors had their names in red, and their levels were marked ??’s. Dammit. I decided there was probably nothing I could do to redeem myself with them until I hit 60, so I gave up and went to the Scryers. I talked with an NPC, got my neutral standing with the Sha’tar, and made the Scryer inn my new home.

So, Aldor or Scryer? What would you recommend for a prot paladin (armorsmith) and an enhancement shaman (leatherworker)? I suspect we’ll be fine regardless of what we choose, but it sounds like changing is a real pain, so we want to choose wisely.  And before you send me to the comparison of the rewards at wowwiki, thanks, but I’ve already seen it. 🙂 What would you recommend?

Much of my other play time this weekend was spent on my hunter, clearing the Zangarmarsh quests from her log. I know it’s not necessary to attack the Outland zones in a linear way, but that’s how I’ve been working so far. I finished up every possible Hellfire Peninsula quest before moving on to Zangarmarsh, and I’m working on finishing Zangarmarsh before going to Nagrand or Terrokar. I’m close to done with Zangarmarsh, actually. I just have a handful of things to finish off (one is a repeatable quest, and I’m not sure how interested I am in repeating it), plus the instances. I’ll likely be out of town this coming weekend, so I probably won’t get to those until next week sometime, but I’m looking forward to seeing more of these places I keep hearing about in guild chat. 😀

Woo! It’s Friday!

… with a big, juicy WoWeekend to look forward to. 😀

The Purple Pox team may be playing on Anvilmar tonight! We’re still waiting to hear from our fifth team member now, and if he can go, we’re all set. If not tonight, we’ll certainly get together sometime this weekend. I can’t wait! It’s great to see folks having so much fun together. (Do check out this delicious review, too. Hee hee hee. And this!)

I’m also wondering if our pally/shaman duo could make a press for 58 and get to Outland this weekend. They’re at 56 now, so it feels like Outland is right around the corner, but I know there’s a lot of XP between 56 and 58. I’m not even going to look up exactly how much it is, I’m just going to close my eyes and run!

(Is it really only 3pm?)

Well, I’m going to go look at cat DPS builds for a while.

Funny non-WoW link of the day: 41 Hilarious Science Fair Experiments.

Pox Arcanum

Pox Arcanum has officially formed! 😀

We met in Orgrimmar last night to sign the charter, and after all the group photos were taken, the green team went out to begin their adventures. (Can’t wait to hear how it went! 🙂 ) There was a bit of team shuffling to accomodate some new arrivals, so many who were formerly on the yellow team have now switched to the new black team. The yellow team is still looking for a few good bloggers/players, so if you think you might be interested in joining us, drop a note over at our new collaborative blog: Pox Arcanum. You can see the makeup of the current teams (along with people’s schedules and so forth) on our spreadsheet.

Even though we haven’t spent much time together in-game yet, this group seems to have a natural camaraderie and I love how folks are already embracing the cooperative spirit of the project, from people sending each other mats for their professions to Daxe outfitting all the clothies with new designer robes (Daxe Fifth Avenue… hee hee!).

Another thing that impressed me is how much money folks have managed to make. Lots of this is from fishing, but people have also been very successfully playing the auction house. When we met last night, there was more than enough money floating around to get a tabard design right away and outfit everyone with tabards. Looks like we’ll have no trouble being self-sufficient after all. This also makes me feel a little less panicky about potentially starting a new family of alts on another server, too, should I ever decide to play alliance. My main server for horde-y stuff currently has all ten slots taken (though two of the characters could easily be deleted, as I don’t actually play/use them any more).

(MMm…. alts.)

(Daydream alt of the day: Orc rogue.)

Another Big Girl Dungeon: Blood Furnace

On Saturday, my hunter finished off all possible solo quests in Hellfire Peninsula, leaving about six group quests (some of which I did attempt, but they were a no go), plus two Blood Furnace quests. I checked the LFG and amazingly found another person looking for a group for one of the group quests… I was stunned. I didn’t think anyone actually used the LFG for that! I messaged them and asked them if they’d like to group, they said yes, and within ten minutes or so, we were off! We completed ALL of the Hellfire Peninsula quests in both our quest logs. There were a couple chains where he was on a later part than I was, so he helped me catch up and we completed everything. We did pick up a third person at one point, which sped things up that much more. All in all, a fruitful session. This left just one thing: Blood Furnace.

As with the group quests, I floated the idea of Blood Furnace to the few guildies that were on, and everyone was busy, so into the LFG I went. We were able to put a group together within about 30 minutes or so. I was very nervous about another Outland pug after the way the last one went, but what the heck…

We had a rogue, a feral druid, a priest, a warrior, and me (hunter). The warrior was very quiet, and left me with no impression. (In fact, I sat here for about 15 minutes trying to remember who the fifth person was.) The druid was tanking and seemed to be very new to it, mostly because of all the reassuring things the rogue kept saying to them. Maybe when the druid joined, they told the rogue it was their first shot at tanking (or maybe they knew each other already somehow)? The rogue was our leader, did all the marking, and directed us through each of the pulls, sometimes successfully, and sometimes not so much.

We wiped on the very first pull. Mobs were marked up, but rather than pull the group back into the hallway, the druid, rogue, and warrior ran in, accidentally grabbed a second group of mobs, and … well. Corpse run. Thankfully we managed to kill a few before we died, so the next few fights were much less overwhelming. It did become immediately apparent that there was some confusion about the marking, however…

For example, in a pull of four, the rogue marked a skull, X, star, and a circle. He didn’t say the order, but I assumed that skull and X were the first and second kills, and I watched him walk up an sap the star. Then the druid ran in and engaged the skull to begin the fight. Skull died, followed by X, and the star was still sapped, so I sent my cat after the circle and it somehow didn’t work. My cat wouldn’t fight the circle, and the circle mob was behaving strangely, not fighting anything, just stepping forward and backward in a cha-cha motion with an occasional side to side shimmy. The sapped mob woke up and we killed it, and then finally the circle. Huh.

“What’s the kill order?” I asked.

“Skull, X, Condom, then Star,” said the rogue. (Heh… condom? That’s a new one.)

“Okie doke.” Next pull, same thing.

“WTF are you doing?” said the rogue. Who me?

“MC,” said the priest.

“Please focus on healing the tank and yourself,” said the rogue. “The tank’s health got a bit too low for my comfort that last pull.”

“K,” said the priest.

Next pull, same thing. Gah.

“We don’t need MC,” said the rogue. “Please focus on your healing.” I checked the DPS meter, and the priest was coming up third.

“MC is fun,” said the priest.

“Corpse runs aren’t. Please focus on keeping the tank alive.”

The priest continued to do as they pleased, and after some rather close scrapes, the rogue asked me if I was good at trapping. I said that I was okay at it and would be willing to try.

“Let’s try,” he said, and marked up two mobs standing in a doorway, one with a skull and the other with a blue square.

I dropped a trap, targeted the mob, waited for the druid to run in, and then pulled the square. He ran right into my trap. I sent my cat in to kill the skull, and dropped another trap as soon as the cooldown was up. The blue square broke out and ran into my second trap just as we finished killing the skull. Everyone then ran in to clobber the blue square. “Very nice,” said the rogue. /beam

After that the rogue marked squares instead of circles for crowd control, and on the whole, we seemed to do a lot better. The priest still wasn’t tossing up many heals, however. He seemed way more interested in DPS, which meant a lot more stopping and eating between fights. While this was annoying (and really slowing us down), I have to admit we were all killed more often by bad pulls than lack of healing. The concept that people didn’t seem to be getting was kiting. “Let’s grab aggro and all run back into the room we were just in,” the rogue would say. The pull would happen, the rogue and I would run back into the other room while both druid and warrior (and sometimes the priest) would rush forward and accidently pull two or three groups instead of the one. There were several wipes, and also several times that I was the sole survivor thanks to feign death. (The times I didn’t manage to cast it were when I got stunned, or clobbering by four things at once.) “I really should take up engineering,” I joked. (I admit this is slightly tempting.)

After many pulls with trapping, the priest said, “let me MC.”

“We don’t need MC right now,” said the rogue. “We need you healing.”

“But its fun,” said the priest. “Mark it.”

After much sighing and eyerolling in whispers to me, the rogue marked one of the mobs in the next pull with an orange circle. Again, we got to watch our enemy do the cha-cha while healthbars dipped dangerously low.

The rogue became increasingly passive aggressive toward the priest, and finally had a big tantrum. The priest had gotten himself killed because he was more interested in DPS and his next cha-cha routine than keeping himself alive, I guess. “Rez plz,” the priest said.

“You’re going to have to run, friend, because the druid’s rez is still on cooldown,” the rogue replied. The four of us stood there eating and drinking in the doorway of a room filled with mobs. After we were all healed up, the rogue said, “Let’s just go ahead without him. We’ve been playing this whole time without heals anyway.” Uhhhh….

Yeah, bad idea. Even minimal healing is better than no healing. Everyone died except me (feign death ftw!). Corpse runs and an even longer wait than if we’d just waited for the priest. The rogue behaved himself a little better after that.

We got to the room with the lever in it that causes all the little rooms on the side to open, bringing in waves of mobs. (Not sure where this is, as I’m still pretty unfamiliar with the instance.) Big time wipe, and I died as well. “Sry guys gtg,” said the priest.

“What???? Are you ^%&ing kidding me?” said the rogue. “GET OUT THEN.”

*blink blink*

The priest hearthed out and left the group, and we all stood there wondering what to do next. “Did he do that on purpose?” said the rogue. Heh…

Clearly we weren’t going forward without a healer. I began typing my “well thanks for the run, guys…” message, as I had some friends coming over to hang out for the evening, and I really needed to go tidy up the living room anyway. Seemed like a good place to stop. The rogue said, “I know a 70 mage that can help us the rest of the way through. My GF!” Hm… would be nice to finish the final quest, but …

Long story short (too late), the mage did come join us, but we were unable to kill the final boss. We actually got very, very close, but we ended up wiping, and in the end, I just didn’t have time for the corpse run, so I had to bail on the group and call it incomplete. Ah well…

In the end, it was yet another pug with communication problems that ended up giving us all needlessly high repair bills. (Mine was more than 6G.) It’s easy to blame the healer in situations like that (especially one so keen on DPS), but the rogue really wasn’t helping things either. Did he really think we could take on a pack of elites with no healer? No, he was just pissed off. I understand the frustration, but taking it out on the group isn’t going to solve anything. He seemed to be a pretty knowledgable player (and apparently added me to his friend list, because he keeps whispering me now), but I’ll be a bit wary of grouping with him again.

So, my hunter is now working her way through Zangarmarsh quests. What a nifty area…