I’d Rather Be Wowing!

/rant

The WoW’s entity that governs all loots and rolls and I - we don’t get along very well. Simply explained, he has his favorites, and I’m not it. I am getting tired of his old routine like putting my much needed upgrade in my least favorite heroics (i.e., Heroic Loken) or end bosses, making me runs countless heroics with only repair bills and pug stories as my reward, and when he “choose” to let me see the shiny loots that I desperately wanted, he made me choke on my rolls.

How can it be more obvious? You keep dropping the leather caster loots that only one person in the group can ever use or the mail caster loots that just end up to be sharded. It’s like you look at our group composition, find out which class/spec we don’t have (or the minority), and decides that it will be that class/spec “day”. Again.

Or how you make the loots that I need drop along with half people of the group that want it (and let it be won by someone who run it for the first time). Or decides that the two same persons win rolls 90% of the time - and make these people shares tier token AND gear category class with me. Tell me what they do for you so I can be one of them, for once.

***

I hate the “luck” aspect of this game - where you don’t get rewarded based on your effort but based on your luck.

/rant

But I can’t help it, I’m so happy when I realized (after wasting several candles) that Prayer of Shadow Word Protection is now raid wide!!!

And really loving the buff for elemental shammy, it’s going to make switching Vh back to resto really difficult :).

Things that E’s working on getting.

1. Titan-forged Hood of Dominance (40 Wintergrasp Mark of Honor).
Sadly, E’s still using Hood of Hexing having no luck from Forgotten Shadow Hood dropping in my countless forays to heroic Strat. At least this seems attainable with effort and not with luck, though with the trade-off of wasted resilience stat. Any other good alternative?

2. Titanium Spellshock Necklace (crafted).
Alternative: Encircling Burnished Gold Chains (25 emblems) or Hateful Gladiator’s Pendant of Dominance (38k honors). Nothing prevented me in getting them except that I’m hoping Chain of Latent Energies (trash drop Naxx10)  or Circle of Arcane Streams (OS10) will someday drop.

3. Titansteel Guardian (crafted).
I am hoping for the cheaper alternative, War Mace of Unrequited Love (heroic nexus), but it is also another item that has been alluding me :(. Currently saving up for titansteel, should be doable by next week.

4. Deathchill Cloak (crafted).
Not in the highest priority with the reason of not being hit-capped if switching from Dark Shroud of the Scourge (plus other planned gear switch, such as the weapon).

The championing system works in raid. With both 10 and 25 man raid, I don’t always have time to run heroics. I’ve been trying to get my rep up with the wrymrest accord, but with their measly 3 daily quests (750 rep total), it will take me almost 2 weeks even if I dilligently do them.

Crafted bags are not soulbound.  I have a bunch of 18 slot bags on E since she started crafting the 20 slog bags. While on Val and Vh, they mostly don 16 slot bags.  But, I can’t even do anything with the spare bags that I have in the bank unless vendor it. It’s such a waste.

We were excited to continue Naxx10 yesterday and make it another new boss night. We were planning to do the 4 horsemen fight and looking forward to practice the safety dance with Heigan. Also, for the first time ever, we didn’t need to pug. Our enhancement shammy managed to leveled up his DK and geared him to the def cap - which involves too-many-to-count trips to HoL, with guildies and with pug (I’m in most of the run, I think I can run that place in my sleep now).

Alas, when we came in, as we are running to Heigan, something was amis. It was too quiet. “Err…isn’t there supposes to be trash mobs in here”, said our GL. Yeah, our raid ID get “stolen”, and this “group” has fully cleared the place.

We were disappointed, that’s for sure. Our GL and our shammy/dk took the blow the most. We were speculating who might have took the raid ID. We run with a total of 3 pug members that week - two offtanks (one on Tues which didn’t end up too well because of the massive lag and another one Thurs that ended up guiding us to a lot of new bosses), and a boomkin. From those three, only the boomkin was online yesterday. So I decided to chat with her - not really knowing how to put things so that she won’t get offended and think we are suspecting her. Luckily the boomkin was so sweet and very understanding, but also was innocent. So it’s between the two tanks. But I don’t think we’ll ever know.

It’s funny with the number of times that we’ve run raid with pugs that this was the first time it ever happened. It’s a “gentle” reminder to choose wisely who you pug with.

Our GL, regardless how disappointed he is, still mentioned that in a sense, if it was the 2nd tank that took the raid ID, the instance is as much right to his as to ours since he helped in the majority of it. Also maybe since he was aware that we were planning to go again over the weekend (which we didn’t end up going), and he might think by then, if we wouldn’t be able to fully clear the place anyway, it is okay to take advantage of the partial clear. Regardless, it would be nice if he would check with us before taking it :(.

Saturday morning, a friend whispered me and asked if I wanted to go for Naxx25 that he was about to form. The group was going to be mostly pug. I was in his pug group several times before, and yet, I didn’t know most of the people in this pug group.

We were attempting 3 wings and he wanted to start with the Military wing. I look at the roster. Hmm 5 priests, but I was the only shadow. I shuddered. That means that I’m going to be given the MC-ing duty. Oh, did I mention that this was my first Naxx25?

You should know from the post’s title - the outcome of attempts. I was the first priest to MC. First pull - Hmm what are all these buttons do? I took too long in initial taunting, MT was downed, and the other priest didn’t have a mic, and I must have missed his msg in raid chat to taunt it over. Why do they have the “cancel” button if it didn’t work for actually dismissing the MC?  Second pull - Raz was distracted too far from the MC-ed guy. As I was going to be in the range for taunt, I broke my MC because I went too far. Upon recovering, the other priest and I were not coordinating our taunt correctly.  Third pull - the other priest asked to be relieved from the duty, so another priest took over. The pull was ok - but messy - because we sometimes have the bone armor on cooldown when we were tanking. Two of the understudies were killed because of that. We just couldn’t recover from it. Fourth pull - things started really nicely. Except…I was following the suggestion to dismiss the understudy after tanking twice. That didn’t work so well. By the time I was asked to taunt the 2nd time, there were less than 15 sec left in my MC. To make matter worst, when the other priest tried to MC to take over my understudy, it broke because he wasn’t hit capped. Note to self - follow what you read in shadowpriest forum and not what people told you. By then, we gave up and went to another wing.

So we ventured to spider wing, one shotted the first boss. Crap…I was going to be asked to MC again. I was totally nervous by then, feeling that I’ve already let down people too many times. I was only half clear on what I was supposed to do. First frenzy - yes, I was ready, hit the button, we were good. Second frenzy - another successful MC. Upon third frenzy -  I had my MC target on focus. By the time they called out for 15 sec before frenzy, I had MC-ed him. All of a sudden, my MC broke. I know that it’s not because it expired. Could it be that I was on the Rain of Fire area? Oh crap. I re-mc-ed the target but nothing happened. Again. And Again. Tanks were dropping like flies. All of a sudden it was over. We managed to burn her down. Someone then told me that when MC breaks, the underlings become immune, and I had to pick another one. Duh…I’ve read about it, I just didn’t remember it :(.

We managed to clear the two wings. I was feeling low the whole the entire time. After the last boss in Plague, some people had to leave. So the raid leader, my friend, was looking for replacements. While we were having a break, the first MC-ing priest wrote in the raid chat that we should find more shadow priests that know how to do crap. I simply commented “Ouch”. I know that I’ve disappointed some people, but that still seems a bit harsh of a comment. What comes afterward was a bit more stingy. He then wrote that he didn’t know I was still there. Another rogue backed him up and indicated that I deserved it because he couldn’t figure out why I kept failing when MC-ing.

So here comes a bit ranty part of my post.

I know that I failed. I could try to come up with a bunch of excuses to justify my poor performance. In the end of the day, more than anything else, I was the one that disappointed at myself for not being able to do my task correctly. But I wish that people can understand that there are always margins of error when it comes to MC (as with anything else). And having to be that person to be responsible for the one breaking point is just too much pressure.

/sigh.

Another note to self: don’t attempt to do something that involves high amount of responsibility in a pug when you don’t know how to do it.

Or so they say….

I was able to finally found the time to log in to WoW yesterday after coming back from a trip and taking care of RL stuff that got neglected during the trip.  The first order of business was speccing back to shadow. If you read my previous post, I’ve mentioned that we have mostly taken care of our healers shortage. Then I proceeded to get the daily quests done.

First to come in mind: “Ugh, is the lag in Dalaran always this bad?” And I realized that I’ve forgotten where everything is at in Dalaran. And that darn lag certainly didn’t help in not getting frustrated when you found out that you just went to the wrong side of Dalaran.

Now that E’s fate is clearer, E bought Sundial of the Exiled which brought me to this tangent thought. You know how nowadays people seems to inquire more about your gear - how many sp you have, etc - this trinket, for example, doesn’t really have static +sp on equip, but it does add a significant chunk on your dps, how do “include” this fact when telling people about your gear?

E put herself in LFG for some heroic runs. I figure that if she gets to do some dps-ing for our Naxx run this week, I better re-familiarize myself with her “rotation” or for a more correct term, the casting priority. It was awful - I kept letting my dots to drop or refreshing them too early. I was spoiled that when healing, you don’t necessarily have to face your target, that I was frequently oblivious of my orientation when casting. But after a while, things started to fall into places. I start remembering to use my shadowfiend and dispersion early. Ahh…it feels good to be a shadow again.

Of course when our GL decided to go to Naxx on a wim that night, we didn’t have enough healers again (one of our healer was locked with another group and the other one was out of town for another week). After our fruitless attempt to secure a healer, I relently offered my service. So, I was back to holy again while wishing that the dual-spec would be implemented soon. Suffice to say that it was not the prettiest healing duty ever, but we kept everybody (most of the time) alive :). The best comment that I heard yesterday was when my GL inquired to how the heck I managed to last cause whenenever he looked up at my mana, he saw my mana was only about one fifth. I’m sure it’s an exaggeration, but I guess months of experience in managing mana as a priest stick regardless if you’re a holy or a shadow.

First off, Happy (belated) New Year! Here’s the hope for a better year in RL and in WoW!

When I left for a 2 week more break without access to WoW, E was specced in holy. Our guild + 2 guildies from our previous raid alliance stepped foot in Naxx for a merely 3 hours. I wish I can say that we were dominating, but we weren’t :(. We only had 2 boss down (the first two in the spider’s wing) and after several attempts on the last boss and on Patchwerk, we had to call it quit. But considering how undergeared we all were - especially the healers (plus E as an inexperienced healer :)) and how this was the first Naxx for all of us, we had a lot of fun in Naxx learning what works (and doesn’t work) for us.

All of our guild’s leveling healers are 80 now! And you know what that means! We now have 4 healers in total. Unfortunately we still only have 1 tank. I hope that some of our tanks-wanna-be will get to 80 soon too.

I am sad that I couldn’t get the present under the tree (again) for the Winter Veil festival. I wish that Blizzard would extend the days when we could get them - though I don’t think it would help in my situation either :).

My goal list is finally updated. Our raid alliance will start our 25-man Naxx soon. I am super excited for that - I love spending time with the “gang”. I still haven’t done any BG or arena as a lvl 80. There’s still a lot of things to do and to see. I can’t wait!