A confession.

I have a mage. A Draenei frost mage. She’s level 69. Lately I have doing more pew-pew than tanking.

Ok I can explain. In terms of personnel we are getting very close to the point of having a good crew for Karazhan. But until then there hasn’t been much for Jess to do. Don’t get me wrong — Jess is still my main and I won’t ever give up tanking (and even if I did I’m sure Keredria would bash me with my own shield until I changed my double-digit int mind). It’s just that it’s nice to try another play style and to see hits land for over 1K for a change.

Aksana is deep frost which is a fantastic spec in my opinion — chill effects, frequent and hard-hitting crits, awesome AoE, some good cooldowns, oh-crap options, and very reasonable mana efficiency. It is worth it for the shatter combo alone (and BTW, if you have points in frostbite you can very ften pull-off one of these without having to use your frost nova or your water elemental’s freeze). I was happy to read on Spicytuna that deep frost and arcane frost are quite viable for endgame as well. I’m not sure how far I will be able to take her once she is 70, but for now she’s more fun than an ample supply of butter and goblin jumper cables.

Tanks…do you heal?

One of my favorite alts is a human holy priest (currently level 51). I find healing very satisfying. Although the role of a healer seems very different from that of a tank, in some ways they are quite similar — neither are specced or geared for damage, and both are there to protect the other party/raid members from harm/death (albeit in different ways). Perhaps another similarity is that (good) tanks and healers are often in high demand, and when they do their job well often reap heaps of praise. It’s always nice to feel needed and appreciated.

So tanks…do you heal? Why or why not? And healers…do you tank? Why or why not?

Special K.

(Ok let me try this again. I accidentally deleted the original post when I was trying to edit it. Also Keredria’s comments keep getting caught in my spam filter. I’m still trying to teach it to like her. Try using fewer four-letter words and risqué comments this time K.)

It’s interesting how we use names in WoW. For example, I am “Jess” even when I am playing an alt which is somewhat confusing to folks that don’t know who is who. We also often shorten names for convenience. For example, Daihiro = D, Atania = A (unless we are grouping with our feral druid friend Adamas in which case he is A and Atania is Ata), Wutan = Wut (woot wut!), Jessika = Jess, and Keredria = K. So the impetus of this post was that I was grocery shopping the other day when I came across a box of Special K cereal. That amused me, as did the screen shot I found at Wikipedia. Isn’t that the kind of gear that clothies find themselves wearing from time to time? K is a “hotty” — as in HoT = heal-over-time. (Perhaps I should have left this post deleted. No more bad jokes…I promise.)

Alas for Azshara.

I love Azshara. It’s an absolutely fantastic looking zone. I’d like to have a house there and another near the beach in Darkshore. Regrettably there isn’t much to do there. There are few quests other than some class quests. The fishing is good, and there is some thorium to be had. But the lack of activity in Azshara is part of its appeal for me. It’s one of the few places in Azeroth and Outland that still feels very large and real for me like when I first started playing the game. Perhaps Blizzard will someday make Timbermaw Hold a new instance, but part of me hopes they don’t.

My jerk tips.

Somehow it took me until quite recently to discover Women of Warcraft. No, it isn’t a special issue of a mens’ magazine. It’s a blog and vidcast. The vidcast often features a “jerk tip” segment concerning tips dealing with, well, jerks (sometimes by being a jerk). Here are a couple of anecdotal jerk tips.

• When Aksana (my Draenei mage) was somewhere in her early 20s I came across a high-level Orc rogue killing the quest givers by the bridge into Westfall (I later learned he was level 70). He /taunts, and I /laugh and /mad, he /flirts, and then I /flirt, and so on. He must have been quite entranced by my gorgeous hooves because he never noticed the level 70 human warlock that came up behind him.
• I was killing harpies with Sula, my Belf warlock, in the Charred Vale in the Stonetalon Mountains. There was a human warrior there, completely naked except for a weapon, who thought it was fun to follow me around and “help.” He was a few levels higher than the harpies so the lack of armor didn’t seem to be a problem, and my Voidwalker was getting a good bit of the aggro anyway. So I sent my Void into a group of harpies, but turned-off his taunt and recalled him just before he struck the harpies. As you might expect the warrior got all the aggro. I really wanted him to come back and try it again as I was going to get out my succubus and have her use her soothing kiss ability to keep her from getting aggro, but the warrior didn’t seem so interested in helping me after his long corpse run.

Baby got crits!

I’ve tried a variety of classes and I’ve found that I’m not really a DPS person. I enjoy tanking and healing more. The rewards are perhaps not quite as tangible as the white and yellow numbers flashing over the heads of mobs, but I just get a bit more from keeping aggro and landing heals. However, I must admit that with my Draenei frost mage Aksana (now level 65) I can definitely see the appeal of a DPS class. Why? Well let me tell you…

I like big crits and I cannot lie
You other mages can’t deny
That when a mobs goes down frozen hard in place
Or burned to ash if that’s your taste
They get sheeped, and you want to attack
But the tank can’t get aggro back
Deep in the instance I’m running
I’m hooked and I can’t stop spamming
…and so on…

Easy tanking.

Tanking is hard work — particularly when it comes to keeping aggro on multiple mobs. I often look forward to a boss fight after fighting through several pulls of trash for that reason. Also from what I have read multi-mob tanking is a bit harder for a protection warrior than a feral druid or paladin. We can do it, and do it well (and better than some people think), but it takes a bit of skill and work. However I’ve found that some instances are fairly easy to tank because of the lack of multi-mob pulls. Arcatraz is one. Here you are often dealing with single trash mobs that are fun because they are like mini bosses, each with their own particular abilities. The other is Black Morass. BM has the reputation of being a pain, but if your group knows what to do it’s very easy to tank since the usually strategy is to let an off-tank and/or DPS deal with the non-elite adds while the tank deals with the elite at each portal and the bosses of course.

Of course my experience with these instances till now is only normal mode. I can’t speak to the trash tanking difficulty of these instances in heroic mode.

This is it.

It was one year ago today that I started playing WoW. Today is Jessika’s “birthday.” I had thought quite a bit about what I would write in this post — perhaps something about how I got into the game, my initial reactions to it, and my progression (or lack of it). But I will save those for later posts. The one thing I have thought about quite a bit but for which I have not found the words is what WoW has meant to me socially. It’s given me to opportunity to keep in touch with old friends and make new ones, which for me is by far the most serendipitous and rewarding aspect of this game.

All keyed-up and nowhere to go.

We finally finished the quest line for getting keyed for Karazhan. It wasn’t that we were having trouble with the instances. We are well within the recommended parameters for starting Karazhan in terms of gear, so the instances we needed to do were not particularly challenging (once we learned them). We just had not gotten around to it. Now we have the difficult problem of not having enough people in our guild for a 10-person raid. I am going to need to see if we can find another small guild that would be willing to do Karazhan cooperatively. I am hoping that by already having a tank and healer to offer this may work, but I realize the difficulties and potential problems of coordinating a raid, let alone one involving more than one guild.

I rewarded myself for finishing the Karazhan keying quest line with the Helm of the Stalwart Defender (not quite 700g on the AH). This is a reasonably good upgrade from my Myrmidon’s Headdress.

’cause I’ve heard it in your pleasure songs…

…that I will turn to dust.

I really enjoy the ambient music in WoW. They’ve done a nice job of matching the music to the zone. Nagrand is somewhat pleasant (the zone reminds me of the set from Teletubbies), whereas Netherstorm has this trippy Hearts of Space thing going (good place to just chill).