So I’ve missed WoW in and among- taking my ‘fix’ harassing people on msn to let me know how things are going on. Two of my friends from Echoes moved to another server to a top 100 guild, and so I’ve been chatting with them about how things are.

I’ve come to the opinion that with the way my game play evolved when I was raid leading, there’s no way I could fit into a guild like that without some serious theorycrafting, and playing to get back on form…. but well it doesnt matter any way.

In one week I’m moving out of my flat. There are boxes everywhere and I have to take them all down to the car and drive them back to my mum’s where there going to be stored.

And in two weeks today I’m on a plane…. well four to be factually correct. I’m flying to Copenhagen, then to Stockholm, then to Istanbul, then to Bodrum. We’re going on a holiday before my course starts to meet some people we’ve played with for the past 3 or so years and to catch some sunshine and party hard.

Seems so far away while I’m sat here letting the tinted moisturiser to hide my pale WoW skin soak in.

Oh and I forgot the biscuits…. damn.

Much has happened since I last posted here.

We got “Of the Nightfall” though it was a very bittersweet night- we had to not take any of our melee – set up was

2 Paladin healers
Druid healer

Warrior tank (drakes)
Pala tank (adds)
Druid tank (on Sarth)

Ele Shammie
Mage
Mage
Shadow Priest

I was sad about the set up we had to use, and as a result didn’t raid lead the attempts, but we got it down – and that was the important thing.

The week after we worked on 6 min malygos, with me solo healing – we were in the end around a minute too late (unfortunatly the strongest dps wasnt available), but solo healing still felt sweet.

The next day it was Ulduar time.

We had some awesome initial progress, but then started to quickly hit our heads against a brick wall – players stopped signing up after 2 weeks of raiding there, and the furthest we got was to Iron Council.

It was at this point I decided to take the guild to inactive status. We’ve been through this situation before- recruiting more people to fill peoples gaps because they couldnt be arsed to wipe. And to be honest I don’t spend half my life in a game or checking tactics and idea’s for people to just not care.

2 members of the council decided to try keep the guild going after I stepped down, but they suffered the same problems and after 2 weeks they transferred to other guilds. rerolled.

I personally at this point reduced my play-time significantly. Transferred to my original home on Scarshield Legion and planned to rejoin a guild I’d played with in TBC towards the end – Echoes. However. I’m taking a sabbatical from my RL job this summer to go to Sweden, learn swedish and attempt to get a job. There’s a lot to do, and if I’m playing WoW I’m not going to do it.

So as of Monday this week I’ve completely stopped playing.

I don’t regret this, it was time for me and its taken so very much of my life over the past few years.

But then without WoW I wouldn’t have met so many amazing people and visited them. I wouldn’t have met Toomaj. I would’t be moving to Sweden.

From a very real point of view, raid leading over the past 6 or so months has also helped in the real world. I’m more assertive and can take better control of a situation than I ever could before. I can tell what motivates people more easily (true in the real world it isnt achievement points, epics, progression or playing with friends) and I actually find it easier to approach and talk to people than I did before I played.

But it was time.

This blog will go on, though I will probably change the skin/etc to reflect that I’m real not a tree anymore.

So about 2 weeks ago or so we finally nailed it, after repeated brickwalling on Shadron, it seemed in the end that it was simply switching the heroism to Shadron from Vesperon, and creative resto druid/Shaman useage.

We used a Druid tank in Fire/Frost gear, with a shaking of nightmare seeds, various resistance flasks and stuffs, a warrior on the drakes and 2 DK’s on the adds.

Healer wise we used the 7 healer tactic, with 3 paladins, 1 Disc priest, 2 Resto Shaman, 1 Resto druid.

DPS wise we took a broad range of casters/melee including Shadow priests and Ele shammies.

We’ve since done the fight once more, and I’m pretty happy with repeatability.

10 man though… oh what a challenge in terms of dragging the right set up >.< more on that another day!

Not long to go I presume until we finally get some new content. Currently still fighting with 3D, though its more a fight to get the optimal set-up online at the same time. Think should I manage that for a couple of days then we should take him down with ‘relative’ ease.

Achievements are something I’m not convinced on. While it gives new content, in a way… it also divides player base. I must admit I don’t really care for some title or another, but harder content and harder fights- yes please.

With the information that Uldar is going to have 10 or so bosses with an additional hard mode, it doesnt exactly fill me with glee, but the fun to begin with is going to be actually clearing the content.

Reading around on the upcoming nerf, it makes me wonder how in practice healing set-ups will actually change, but I’ll think over that and maybe post something later- really hoping I can read some PTR Literature, or get on there myself.

Well on the eve of 3.0.8 I look back over Wild Growth… and kinda feel a bit short changed that I haven’t really had the time to bask in its multi-person healing awesomeness before it got its brand new cooldown.

I’ve used it in certain fights (it’s lovely on the Vortex on Malygos, rather good on that guy in Plague wing, and nice with multiple drake Obsidian Sanctum), I’ve used it when I’ve just looked at grid and thought…. holy hell many to heal there! But well I don’t think I’ve had enough time to really appreciate it, and it certainly isn’t up there with my regrowth/lifebloom/rejuvenation spam.

Anyways, at least we aren’t hit as hard as the priests. I’m really going to have to reconsider the roles of some of my healers in raids I suspect.

I can’t wait for dual spec to be implimented in game, for one rather simple reason. My respec bill is always 50G, this isn’t because I respec before every raid…. it’s because I spec wrong nearly every damn time I change trees!

Take this week for example, I’ve been away visiting a friend- before I went away I was boomkin so I could do a 5 man with a healer friend…. in the rush to spec oom, of course I probably put a few points in the wrong place (and yes I know somewhere, somehow there’s an add-on that fixes that for me). When it comes to speccing back (I’m in a raid about to take down Sapphiron, raid leadishing and have a few people whispering me about varying things), I start throwing points into the wrong balance talent, before just going off on one and randomly clicking trying to have a spec before the boss is engaged. Its not that its hard to spec resto (clicky clicky most spells), its just my attention spam is shorter than the time it takes to click the same talent 3-5 times.

I’ll have full bags once more, but at least maybe I’ll have 2 decent trees.

Not posted for a little while, you can quite probably guess why! Yes levelling.

A few things have changed since I last posted, the biggest being that now I’m in charge of the guild (which happened just before Wrath hit… talk about timing), and so when it came to levelling it was important I hit the magic number as quickly as possible. Easy right?

Well no, since my real life decided that it was time for me to work 12 hour+ days with a commute around something while not as bad as the M25, not far off. So I wasn’t as fast as I wanted.

I won’t mention the ganking, the wanting to scream for levelling as resto (why oh why did I not respec after Gundrak at level 74… why?), I will mention my protectors: a glaive rogue (the green matches my branches no?) and a warrior who did a hell of a lot to help out.

So level 80, how is it feeling? Well Heroics are refreshingly challenging at times (and HoTs are totally ruling). Violet Hold makes me want to scream everytime I die and can’t get back in (and reminds me of Black Morass at fresh level 70 in greens and blues). Naxx 10 is showing me that my T6 gear while getting me through is lacking MP5. A few upgrades have been greatfully recieved.

Respeccing from Enchanting to Inscription is with a big bonus in the form of shoulder enchant, especially since the new rep guys are a complete arse to grind.

Will post a little more on my feelings on specs and gear and everything a little later on- right now its time to do the coursework I’ve been putting off >.<

I’ve played in various realms with people who play from net cafes, and always viewed it with distrust and caution when it’s come to members of the guild and raiding.  We’ve had terrible connected main tanks, people getting hacked and whole banks going bye bye, people being on terrible pc’s, none patched pc’s the works.

Not something that I’d do in the UK, and certianly not something I’d recommend- though it really seems as though in countries its the norm.

Now the other week I was in deepest darkest somewhere, with trusty laptop and wireless broadband bought especially so when I’m away from home I can play WoW… except in the room of the hotel there was no 3G connection, and the free wifi the pub offered seemed to not wish to travel 1 flight of stairs and 5 rooms along.  This led to me resorting to sitting in the bar and playing, and I guess leading to a situation not dis-similar to that of a net-cafe, only much older people looking at me with a confused look.

Okay thats a tangent from what I originally set out to write, but hey! I can work with it.

Basically I work away from home a lot, now earlier in the year I purychased mister Acer laptop to allow the addiction to continue, and to make the away from home crap feeling a little less along with the feeling of letting the guild down/having to eat in a pub alone/etc.  Only the places that offer wifi accomodation tend to be quite expensive (£10 a night for a substandard connection that goes down in quality as the number of buisness men watching porn goes up), or if its free wifi its invariably a terrible connection- the one exception being Liverpool John Lennon Airport…. strange I know.

With this in mind (and a hefty bill from the last premier inn Swisscom connection that left me DCed in a gas cloud on felmyst), I decided to try out one of these dongly wifi things, £15 a month for up to 3gig, so as long as the patch wasn’t coming out it was all fine.

It works… sometimes better than others- if I’m on 3G networks, then its pretty spiffy, in-game 400-600ms – I can play with that.  Only the past week well till tonight its been GPRS connection and, well lets say I can playish in a levelling fashion up to 6000ms, anything above and I’m completely useless- and apprarently it was spiking at 15,000ms- well when it didn’t just clear kick me out.

So maybe I’ve learnt a little compassion for those who play in internet cafes… or maybe I’ll be checking for the proximity of them when I’m away from home next!

This rambling was brought to you with the word: Halloween, and the number 13

Realm Jumping for beginners

If you’re embarking on this journey yourself then there are a few things to remember- you need to take the things that you need such as things from alts/banks etc (the guild bank does not come with you *wink*), and you need to pack wisely – consider if you are taking an alt character with your mats with you if you have a lot of stuff (bearing in mind thats another £15 to Blizz), and remember that your alt must be level 10 to travel transfer airlines, and can only carry limited gold related to their level.

Realm hopping actually only takes around an hour once you’ve put in all the pertinant details into the account manager, so don’t worry about all that taking days stuff.

*Empty your mailbox or you’ll get an error message.
*Ensure you’re logged out of your character.
*Ensure you have the mats and/or gold you need want.
*Don’t forget to say bye!

And onto me
I’ve realm jumped 3 times now, and each time I thought was the last. I’m not really one for lining Blizzards pockets with more of my money but each time it I really wanted to do it for differing reasons of course.

If I gave one word answers for each realm jump, it would look a little like this:-

Jump 1 – Progression
Jump 2 – Friends
Jump 3 – Nostalgia

If I up it to three words though, you maybe get a clearer picture…

Jump 1 – Progression, Escapism (from), Whispers
Jump 2 – Friends, RP, Belonging
Jump 3 – Nostalgia, Leadership, Friends

So yea, the thing that got me was the alarming regularity (about a month it takes me to get itchy feet at the moment) that I seem to transfer. Though both jump 2 and jump 3 coincide with real-life meetings with the guilds I jumped to, and jump 1 coincides with a personal situation.

If I had known what I know now, jump 1 wouldn’t have happened because I would have joined the guild I joined on return (Echoes), but then would I- I really enjoyed seeing SWP pre-nerf, and if the guild hadn’t transferred to Sylvanas I probably would have remained there.

Seems that really its just a really expensive way to guild swap…. *sigh*

Well dispite my total can’t be arsed feelings with achievements, I decided to do a few of the fishing ones today (side step the zombies if you please). Quite annoyed that dispite my in-guild known fishergirl status I apparently haven’t ever fished from a pool nor caught 25 fish (yes I know post 3.0.2), so quickly have got to work to rectify this.

*25 Fish – yea easy peasy I’ll do that one while on my Outland fishing mission.
*Fishing from a pool – really?! very taxing achievement if I do say so myself
*Outland Fishing – quite a quick one for sure.
*Scavenger – oooooo partial old school fishing, though Stranglethorn N +S, Zangermarsh, Ashzara and Wetlands, was nice to get Ashzara fully explored at the same time.

* And fishing the boss from ZG was the final mission of the day (and one that included picking up the quest and going to Mister Pagle (after being afk eaten in Theramore).

Not too bad really, though then I did try to go invasion hunting in Tanaris, but seemed like they all ran away from me since in the end when I got there all to be seen were some bones…. ah well

Trying to decide whether to even look sideways at Stranglethorn this afternoon, I’ve tried the fishing contest once (and my friend Dida won it that day) and done remarkably poorly- and besides I’ve had 9 Mister Pinchys to my name- I don’t need a better rod or hat.

Do I really want to be called salty?