One Twisted Guy

This Satuday June 25th I will be a guest on the super awesome podcast, The Twisted Nether Blogcast. Clearly they are desperate for guests otherwise they wouldn't be having me on. Since they record live, all of my faithful readers should come to their site and join the chat room and heckle me or ask questions or just listen to me ramble on about how alcohol and no pants leads to successful raiding.

Recording starts at 8 PST! So plan to be there to listen to me bore the hosts Hydra and Fim with my long and boring stories about raiding in the 80s, 90s, and today. Or something along those lines. See everyone there on Saturday!

Need if you need

Often in heroic randoms, you will see someone ask if it is ok with the group if they need on a piece of gear. That piece could be an upgrade for their main spec or even their offspec. If it's an offspec role, than if they are lucky, no one else needs the piece. But every now and then you will run across someone who doesn't bother to ask if they can need on a piece for their offspec, even after someone else says they need it for their main spec. This is a huge problem for healers and tanks. I have had so many upgrades stolen from my healers and tanks by people who are queued as a dps or a tank or healer.

The old saying "Need if you need" has lead people to assume that just because they CAN need on an item, that they are entitled to roll on it, even if it is not for the spec that they are queued as and it's an upgrade for someone's main spec. People see that they can need on it and figure that their own need outweighs someone else's need. It is both sad and infuriating when I see this happening in instances, the trollroics being the latest cause of this type of behavior. All you can do when someone needs on your upgrade is hope that the WoW loot Gods are on your side and that you out roll the other person. Of course you may have this happen to you several times in an instance and all I can say is Good Luck.

I had this happen to in Zul'Aman when I was healing it on my Gnome Priest. The Paladin tank was obviously not geared for pulling as much as he was and so people were dying because they kept pulling agro on mobs that he was obviously not actively generating threat on. One of the DPS was from the same guild as the tank and he started berating me for letting him die. I explain that "Mr. Pull more then he can handle" can't hold agro on everything and that we should use some CC. Of course I phrased it a little more diplomatically and didn't lay the blame on anyone specifically. I am assuming that the two of them were off in their own vent server talking trash about my healing. We managed to make our way to the Hex Lord Malacross when a healing ring dropped. It was an upgrade for me since I was still sporting two 346 ilevel rings so I naturally needed...and so did the Paladin tank. Maybe he thought that stacking spell power was still the way to go for Paladin threat. Thankfully I won the ring and he apologized for needing on it and I let it go since I had the ring.

We wipe a few times on Daakara because we had the Lynx and the tank didn't understand that he needed to taunt the boss back onto him when it switched to a different target. Finally we kill him and I see what I was hoping for the entire run: the Amani Scepter of Rites. Now this mace hadn't dropped any of the times that I had been there on my priest and I was naturally excited to finally see it. And that's when the bomb dropped; the tank needed the mace...and won. I asked him if I could have it because I was the healer and it was clearly a healing weapon AND a huge upgrade for me. Well that's when the Pally revealed that loot was based on turns or in his words "You won the last piece and now it's my turn to win a piece." He then drops group as I am standing there speechless and right before I drop group his guildee calls me a scrub healer and laughs at me.

If I could punch people through the internet, there would have been two little kids with black eyes somewhere out there. The sad thing is that because of the randomness of the looking for dungeon tool, unless I roll on their servers and chew them out in trade or through whispers, there are no repercussions for them. They can keep needing on gear that isn't for their main spec and if they win it, they'll have stolen another piece of gear from someone who actually needs it. All I can do is ignore both of them so that they don't end up in my random group again, and queue for another random trollroic where I can hope to get ZA so my mace can possibly drop. I was seriously tempted to roll an alt on their server though, that's how mad I was.

I beg you, my readers, please don't ninja need items for your offspec when someone needs the item for their mainspec. With the Midsummer Fire Festival starting today, the Frost Lord Ahune will be available through the LFD tool and I know that people will be tempted to ninja need cloaks for their offspec. Please take a minute and think if needing on a cloak for your secondary spec is worth the aggravation and frustration that you are inflicting on someone who is queueing as their main spec and could use the upgrade. I know my words will probably fall on deaf ears for some people but I accept that. Maybe just one person will read this and change their mind about ninja needing.

Goodbye old friend

Amongst the many changes that are happening in Patch 4.2, we will be bidding adieu to a dear friend. Is it Tyrande or Chromie or Sylvanas or even the basic campfire? No...I'm talking about a closer friend. One that many people take for granted nowadays. This dear friend has been with us since Vanilla and I still remember what life was like before it. I am of course talking about the keyring. Yes...the bag that automatically holds all your keys. Yes, I am indeed for serious. According to the patch notes for 4.2 the keyring will be removed and existing keys will either be converted to gold, removed entirely, or moved to players' inventories. This means that the keyring along with most keys in game will be going away.

Why should anyone care about a keyring or instance keys being removed you may be asking yourself. Well let me fill in a little history for those of you who have always had a keyring in game. Way back in the dark ages of Vanilla Wow, you would sometimes come across keys for random things such as the key to Searing Gorge, the key to the City, the Crescent Key, or even the Scarlet Key. Now at the time, all of these keys were actual items that would go into your inventory since there was no keyring. Big deal you may say, its just a bag space being used. Well at the time 16 slot bags were the highest bag you could have unless you raided Onyxia's lair and were lucky enough to snag yourself one of her bags and even that bag was only an 18 slotter. Bag space was at a premium and if you planned to run an instance such as BRD, Scholo, Strat, or even DM, you had to carry the key with you in your bags. You had to work hard to get some of these keys and that usually meant a lot of time and effort but once you had a key...you were like a God amongst men! Well, you weren't really but you could be all super awesome and brag about being able to open doors. Sometimes you could even make some money just opening an instance door.

If you made the mistake of selling or trashing the key, more often then not...you could NOT get another one. If you were 60 in Vanilla WoW, you would often find yourself running Scholo/Strat/DM for gear/gold/fun and if you didn't have the key for the instance you were stuck outside waiting until some nice soul came by and opened the door for you. Now I don't know about the rest of you but I had some bad luck with groups being formed and no one having the key for the instance. IT SUCKED! A lot. Especially when no one realized that they didn't have the key with them only after everyone was waiting at the instance door. Unless you had a warlock with you, the group would often fall apart then and there because having to sit around waiting for the one person with the key to hearth, run to the bank and grab the key, and then take a gryphon/boat to the instance meant that you were sitting around for 20-30 minutes on average.

Why did I mention a warlock? Well at the time, instance stones weren't the summoning stones that they are now. Clicking on one would put you into a weird looking for group channel just for that instance which most people either didn't know existed or just ignored. Without the easy warlock summon, it was usually a long run. Warlocks also had the awesome ability to lifetap themselves to near death, agro a mob onto themselves, and die at the door. When they ran back to their body, they could rez on the other side of the door and use the lever, which all doors had nearby, to open the door for the group.

The day that the keyring was added to the game was the day that those of us who spent the time and effort getting instance key quests done, finally had available bag space! No longer would we have to run back to the bank and grab a key or hope that we would have bag space when the key dropped in Strat. The keys would all just automatically jump into our keyring. It was glorious. And soon the keyring will end its WoW Career and join the many outdated features of WoW past such as long attunement quest chains for raids, crafting resist gear for raids, having to wait until level 40 to get a land mount, being able to spec into all three trees almost equally, and being dismounted when you hit water.

Goodbye old friend, I will miss you. Whenever I run across a key of any sort, I will think fondly of our time together.

RIP Keyring (2005-2011)
RIP Most Keys (2004-2011)