A pretty eventful past two days...

Seeing as it's Valentines Day, I'll start with my favourite poem this year:

Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
This is a knife,
now get in the fucking van.

Aaaah, so sweet.

The week, I mostly be being busy

So anyways, over the past two days I've been doing a lot of alt playing. I've tanked a few heroics on my warrior, done a few heroics and Ulduar (which was AWESOME - more on that later tho!) on the shaman and have done a few raids (not so awesome - more on that later too) on the rogue. I've also been messing around on some lower level alts, taking in the sights, dressing them up in end game gear to see how cool they'd look if I actually had to motivation to level yet another character...y'know, the usual stuff.

So my trips into heroics on my warrior have been largely un-eventful, mainly because they were with guildies. Which was cool, although I'm kinda worried about where Wulfy learnt to heal using only one hand...

My weekly trip to the land of free loot, often called VoA was a little eventful, some people really dont understand the simplist of loot systems. I shall explain.

I almost lost my T10 resto shaman gloves to someone who's main specc was elemental - why? Because "he needed them for offspecc." I was a little pissed off at the raid leader for not setting it to master looter, but it's not hard for people to understand how it works - If it's for your class and there's no one else there of the same class as you, hit "Need," if it's for your class and there's someone there also of the same class as you, see what specc they are, if the peice of loot is for your specc, hit "need" if it isn't, and it is for their specc, pass. If it's for neither of your speccs, (after asking before doing so) hit "need." It's pretty much common sense, although I am well aware the way I just explained it then doesn't really make it sound it. This shaman didn't do that, and followed the "If the hat isn't red, it belongs on your head" rule.

The other members of the raid started to kick off - I actually remained calm. The other shaman wasn't very good with english and for me to start insulting him in my broad, northern tones would only confuse him and with confusion comes anger and with anger comes raid quits and that doesn't solve anything. So, after everyone else whined, I just told him nicely, he traded me the item and I breathed a sigh of relief.

Hardmodes are still hard

The almost weekly trip into Ulduar was fantastic. I'm getting the hang of this healing lark now and was quite confident to say that myself and the other healer could take on the challenge, and boy did we! Flame Leviathon went off without a hitch and we confidently strolled onwards to XT. I wasn't exactly aware we were going to do hardmode, so as per usual, I validated my raid spot by making everyone massive and roar and proceeded to heal. I only became aware of this hardmode plan when I saw the "heart has severed from his body." I have to admit, I paniced, just a little. It was a wonderful challenge. The tanks were at the same level of gear as the guilds main tanks were back when we attempted Hardmodes for the first time - they were squishy, but not TOO squishy. The dps were a little over-geared and my disco-dancin' priest partner in healin' crime is vastly more geared than my little noob-aman but we managed, and what a feeling it was! The Ulduar raids that get run have been christaned "Tardraid" but everytime I go in there, we do better, go further and die a lot less, it's great to see people who hadn't raided before improve, in both dps and spacial awareness and it's wonderful to see the raid leader improve as a leader and try harder things, pushing the members of the raid. We cleared up to Mimiron last night and had a few solid attempts, each time getting him well into Phase 4.

The only downside to these raids is that I cant join people on Vent, due to the stupid universities internet. Makes me feel like a prick whenever I suggest things after a wipe as I sound like I'm nit-picking and probably repeating whatever's been said over vent.

Where have all the axes gone?

So since Vorla made me a red lumberjack t-shirt, I've been after an axe.

My rogueout is getting less and less, which is wicked, I'm enjoying raiding again but I cant bring myself to do heroics until I've got combat as my dual specc and before that can happen, I need to get myself a nice, slow, main hand weapon. Preferably an axe, so I can wear my lovely red flanal t-shirt.

So yesterday, I had a poke around in ICC10 to get the last 7 emblems for my new shoulders (which are AWESOME) and we did quite well, no axe dropped from the Gunship event but I didn't hold out for much, I mean, it'll never drop when I'm on my rogue but will (and has) dropped everytime I've set foot in there on my 3ft cannon. We had an attempt on Festergut, where our best attempt was a 2% wipe. Which we'd prolly had done if our hunter hadn't pulled aggro (seriously, how do you do that as a hunter, they have this special button and everything...). We carried on but realised, after a stupid wipe that our non-guilded tank was a complete tool, who didn't think it was good enough to have the Taunt glyph when main tanking in ICC10. Y'know, the glyph that stops you needing 11-million-trillion-gazillion hit to make your hits not miss and something manageable, like 150 something or other. She also used annoying smilies. Bitch.

Then today, I tried ToC10, where I had to kick a shaman because they were so annoying I had people spamming some pretty imaginiative macro's to tell him just how annoying he was. So, in the end, I asked him if he knew what Karate was, to which he replied "What?" - Thanks a fucking lot for spoiling my amazing way of kicking you - I asked him again and got the same answer...
"Kung fu?" I say
"YEAH" says he, with added caps lock to show he actually knew.
"Dodge this kick then" I reply, a smirk spreading over my behind-keyboard face
BAM one less annoyance.

I grabbed me another dps and we "smoothly" cleared ToC10. No axe from Anub. QQ.

However, having my new found love from shamans, I took a look at the shaman healer we had in the raid, I said "smoothly" above because the two healers struggled and after looking at this shamans healing, I could definitly see why...75% of his healing was from Chain heal. It doesn't work that way, you've got more than one ability...He'd use Earth Shield about 4 times, it was terrible. The poor priest had effectivly solo healed up until the last boss. Poor bugger...

I definitly think that having a tank, healer and many a dps in this game has opened up more doors. I can help out a lot more, especially since people are usually short a tank or healer, organise more stuff and understand the game a lot better having looked at it from all three view-points. Even if it's made me a right synical bastard when people are completely crap :D