About two weeks too many.

After nearly a week off from the Molten Front dailies on Leafie, I cautiously attempted doing some of them today on Aegidius. He could actually use the gear, poor non-raider he. And I swiftly discovered that it was killing my will to live, never mind my will to play the game. So I stopped.

I think I’ll level my warlock some more tonight. Low-level questing is actually fun.

The Molten Front questline takes about twice as long as I found bearable. I have no idea how or why I finished it. But the experience makes me think that WOW is definitely a game in decline. Patch 3.3 is, in hindsight, its pinnacle.

Wild ride!

Last night we reconvened for the last evening of our ICC10 lockout, which had been engaged in Lich King attempts. Some people in the raid had killed him before on the toons they were playing, some on their mains, and a handful of people had never killed him before at all. Our raid leader was stuck at work until late, but fortunately Trax had returned from vacation and could sub in.

This was also good because warrior + DK is a better combination for this fight than warrior + bear. Warriors truly struggle picking up the ghouls + horrors in phase 1. Trax could probably do that in his sleep. Trax took over Lich King tanking duties in phases 2 & 3 as well, since Trax’s health with the ICC buff is an absurd number.

Our first attempt was obviously going well despite a plague hiccup in phase 1 that took out our resto shammy. The first three valk/defile cycles in phase 2 made it clear that people had figured out the collapse/expand pattern. Also, the DPS was utterly destroying the Valks, which we’d been struggling with on Thursday. I got picked up twice and seriously, I don’t think the Val’kyr made it past the center ring either time.

Phase 3 transition was rockier. We carried a Raging Spirit with us a long way through phase 3 because it wasn’t getting dpsed for reasons unknown. This tied up the off-tank and made Soul Reapers scary, but the real problem was that our off tank couldn’t soak Vile Spirit explosions. We lost people, but held on. The Lich King hit 22% and I thought, hey, we can do this, this is going to be a kill! Then splat, the resto shammy went down for the third time. And then the discipline priest got picked for Soul Harvest. He died before I could react (down from Vile Spirits, I think). Only one healer left, me! I thought, okay, that’s a wipe, but said in Vent, “Let’s play it out and see how far we get.” Then I looked at my mana and how much time was left before my next Innervate and nearly regretted saying that. By the time Innervate came up again, I was down to 2% mana, triaging hard, and had lost somebody else to Vile Spirit explosions. I did my level best to stay way the hell away from them myself, because if I went down it was definitely over.

At around 15%, we had one hunter (who is a pretty great player), 1 DK tank, 1 warrior off-tank, and me left standing. The warrior got sucked into the Frostmourne room. With only Serix the Hunter dpsing, the Lich King fell.

Paradoxically, the healing was pretty easy through those last few percent. Just five targets (then four when I lost our dps DK), and most of the damage was coming in to Trax. At some point Serix said, “Ignore the spirits” on Vent, because it was time for a Lich King burn, and then I spewed mana and hotted the three of us to the nines.

I think Trax said that I kept the remains of the raid ticking for 2 minutes on my own. My log parse agrees. I would probably be more pleased by that if I’d kept everyone up and had stopped losing people. But still, that was an epic kill. Definitely the reason why I play this game!

Also, I really get a kick out of getting people their Kingslayer titles.

Blergh.

I’m back from a bit of vacation, and realizing that the thought of catching up with what happened in the WoWverse while I was gone just depresses me. I think I don’t care that much. So I won’t catch up.

I also think I’m going to crank my raiding down to 3 days a week instead of the 5 or 6 it had crept up to. I love the people I raid with, but it’s blighting the rest of my life with all the time it takes up. Sigh.

Reminding myself of the basics.

I had thought that this week my guild would be contracting to just one ICC10 team, a progression team built to kill more than the 5 bosses we can routinely down with two groups. But that seems not to be happening yet. So last night I led another ICC10 raid. The core group of people was the same as the last couple of weeks, but also had our couple of newcomers who’d never seen the fights in person.

It was, despite a really inattentive shaky start from me as leader, a very smooth clear through the lower spire, the fastest clear I’ve managed yet in my raids. We went on to wipe on Festergut three times before losing our hunter to an early real-life-forced departure. I believe with some tweaking from me to roles and positions, we could have killed Fester as usual. I was hoping to, because it would have been my first time managing a 5-boss kill night in ICC. Ah, well. At least one of our newcomers got a couple of nice upgrades, despite the shower of unwanted hunter/enhance shammy loot that dropped. (And he talked me into buying Elder Scrolls: Oblivion for the PS3, based solely on my fond memories of Morrowind.)

I finished up the night with a checklist of things I will need to do better on next time I lead a raid like this. (Sample embarrassing item: “Remember to announce timing for Heroism and to call for it every fight.”) I am so very not ready to lead 25s yet. Despite that, I generally felt good about the raid and felt that I’d managed to make sure everybody had a good time.

However.

My guild is going to be stuck in ICC25 at the Festergut DPS check for some time. I have no idea what the ICC10 progression plans are and communication seems to be in some disarray about it. I’m half-dismayed about the idea of being with the progression team, because the guild leader’s raiding style is… Well, it’s quite different from my own idea about how to motivate people and lead them to shared goals, let’s say that.

To make matters worse the best friend I’ve made in the guild, the tank who likes pancakes, left the guild this week. I completely understand why he left, but I’m still blue about it.

It is at times like these that I need to remind myself of my goals in the game. What do I want to do?

• Defeat the Lich King some time before the damage/health boosts take effect in Icecrown.
• Be an integral part of that experience by playing my druid well.
• Work on hard modes and other difficult things in the game.
• Win good gear & achievements, the badges of honor that say my character has done difficult things.
• Raid with guildmates who also take pride in playing their classes well, in an atmosphere of mutual respect.
• Spend my leisure time with people I enjoy talking to, no matter how different our backgrounds or ages might be.

Things I don’t need, though I’d be okay if they happened:

• To lead anybody, whether that be a healing team or a raid team. I’m okay with being a peon. “Something need doing?”
• To do it before anybody else in any particular subgroup does it. I don’t need a server first or faction first.

Things I wish to avoid:

• Poisonous atmosphere in Vent. Sarcasm as raid leading tool. Insults as a raid leading tool.
• Any sense of unfairness about loot or guild promotions.
* People around me treating each other badly. This seriously kills any fun I might already have been having.

Hmm. Okay.

Restoring the restoration druid.

My main is a Blood Elf paladin tank who’s in a tiny friends-n-family guild. I play him about once a week, when we cruise pretty efficiently through a heroic or two. The pally is geared well enough to do 5-man heroics in his sleep, but no further geared than that. He’s the very definition of a casually-played character. I enjoy tanking, and I could decide to play him in PUGs more often and gear him further. But I wanted a change of pace.

I’ve had this druid kicking around for a while on the Alliance side of the same server. My original plan was to have her just kicking around doing all the things one can do solo, as a way to play without social stresses. When I got bored with the paladin a couple of months ago, I leveled her the rest of the way up to 80. She’s had dual specs for a while, with the second spec being resto, but since she’s unguilded I had almost zero opportunity to heal with her until I hit 80. Feral kitty cat dps all the way.

Then I healed Halls of Lightning with a solid group, and I thought, wow, healing can be fun. It’s more stressful than tanking, because I’m not in control, but it’s a pretty interesting resource management problem. I’d like to do more of that. But not on that server with that ping and that big established server assumption about not being in purples already meaning badness. I wanted to do it on an RP server, where people trouble to type complete English sentences every now and then.

So I hopped servers, and now I’m ready to start the restoration project. Let’s see if I can turn Gingkoe into a reasonable raiding healer over the summer.

What’s her starting point? Her gear score is a low, low 2223 as I type. She’s got green items, under 80 items, missing enchants, low-level enchants, and a glyph for Healing Touch that I think is pretty much the wrong glyph. She has no WotLK reps up to exalted yet. She has no guild, and I have no clue what guilds even exist on the server. She needs an engine rebuild and some new bodywork.

Let’s go.