Keep on keeping on

Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. I think this quote from Ferris Beuller's Day Off kind of sums up what I've been up to the last few weeks. The last time I blogged I wrote about Virtual Realms and Flex raiding and since then we have received more information about both. I am eagerly awaiting both and I wish I could speed up the patch so that it could be 5.4 already! When I started blogging I had so much free time that I could write a lot of posts in between classes but when I got a job I suddenly lost all that free time. Eventually I had the desire to blog but whenever I would sit down to write something I would get writers block. You (the few readers I still have) probably read the few words I write and think to yourselves "how the hell can it take such a long time to write such short, uninteresting, mindless drivel??" 

Well my response is..uhmm..yeah I got nothing. But since you do read my blog regularly, I can safely reason that you:
1) have bad taste since you read my ramblings
or 
2) enjoy punishing yourself by reading my blog 
or 
3)are either used long delays betwen my blog posts 
or 
4) have me on your feedreader by accident and are now wondering who the hell I am.

So like yeah!

I apologize for the above. I blame global warming or something.


Anyway back to life in WoW!

I've been keeping busy in game by doing several things and sometimes all at the same time! I've been pet battling and have managed to get the different World Taming achievements. I am very ready for the pet battle stuff in the next patch with my uber leet team of over 30 level capped pets! I've also been running the ToT LFR with the wife every now and then. Clearly I have to get my alts ready to raid the Siege of Orgrimmar when it comes out! 

Speaking of alts, I have been leveling several of those and I am now at about 12 level capped characters. Only two are mages and two are DKs(one horde). Of those 12 level 90 characters, 10 of them are able to run the MSV LFR, 7-8 can do HoF/ToES, and about 5-6 can do ToT. What can I say, I enjoy leveling alts and apparently gearing them. I might have a problem...only 50 character slots per account!

Moving on, my guild just hit our eight year anniversary in July! Huzzah for making it this long!! We are still going on and doing things but sadly the Throne of Thunder raid came at a bad time for us as we are being hit by the attendance boss. I expect that when 5.4 and the Siege of Orgrimmar raid comes along we'll probably flex raid the hell out of it until we can normal raid the hell out of it! If you are wanting to flex raid and are alliance side, let me know and we can work something out! Right now our scheduled Flex Raid time is going to be 5-8 PST on wednesday nights. We have 2 tanks at the moment but I'm sure we can accommodate another one(maybe I'll be able to dps on my mage instead of tanking!) if we get another one. 

So yeah thats what I've been up to since the last time I blogged. 5.4 and Connected Realms(new name for Virtual Realms) are almost upon us and I am eagerly awaiting their arrival! Until next time here is a fun story of an instance run that I was involved in back in BC.

I was leveling my warlock and decided to run Sethekk Halls and put out the call in guild to see if anyone wanted to come with me. My wife(just a friend at the time) volunteered to come on her lock and a guildee came along on his shadow priest. Since this was BC there was no LFD tool to use so we had to find a tank and healer the old fashioned way: spamming in trade until we found them or gave up. We got lucky and were able to find a tank and healer after a short while and we all proceed to the instance and run inside. It became apparently really early on that the tank(a warrior) was not very good at tanking. He wasn't thunder clapping to get agro and he wasn't cleaving. 

Now this was back in BC when tanks(especially warriors) had to fight to hold agro. After a few pulls where the dps was tanking mobs, I noticed that none of the mobs had a single application of sunder armor on them. As a tank at the time you would spam sunder armor as fast as you could on each mob so that you could have threat on each of them. When tanking multiple mobs you'd taunt one mob, sunder armor it, tab to the next mob sunder armor it, tab to the next sunder armor it, and thunderclap/cleave as much as you could. This was how you generated threat back in the day against multiple mobs. It SUCKED as a warrior but it was doable. Well we wiped in the first big room in the instance because one of us got MC'ed and feared the rest of the group into more mobs who agro'ed and proceeded to kill us.

Up to this point the warrior has not said anything in party chat since he whispered me that he could tank for us. He proceeds to tell us that we need to target adds and that we "need to lock it down." My guildee, my wife, and I were all on vent talking about the group and we all read that and were struck silent for a few seconds. We ask each other if anyone had any clue what he wanted us to do but eventually we realize that he wants us to shackle(which we had 1 of since we my guildee was a priest) the MC mob since it was undead. We tell him in party that we only have one shackle since we only have one priest in the group. I suppose this was not good enough for him because he says "Lock it down fukwitz!" At this point you can just hear the confusion the three of us in vent grow. We start asking each other if he just didn't understand that we weren't priests or if he didn't care and just wanted some sort of CC. Now at the time there were no glyphs for fear so if someone feared a mob, it would run around until the fear broke. This was obviously a bad thing because the mob would run around agro'ing every single mob pack it ran by. The only other CC locks had was the Succubus seduce but this was sadly unreliable as it was prone to breaking and the mob would make a beeline right to the warlock. Life as a warlock in BC was not for fun times, that's for sure.

So we try to explain that we don't have any other CCs available and to do what he can. This leads us to getting up to the first boss with a few deaths but nothing too major. We pull and he has trouble holding agro on the boss but thankfully we were able to down it. We tell him he needs to sunder more and that he needs to taunt adds off us. He then proceeds to tell us that his sunder has an eight second cool down so he cant spam it. Now at this point in BC I had raid tanked on my warrior and my spriest guildee had a warrior main. We both instantly call bullshit on him and tell him that no it only has a 1.5 global cool down. He starts ranting about how we are wrong and that he is tanking fine. We move along clearing mob packs and dps tanking things that the tank should have held agro on. The tank randomly yelling "lock it down fukwitz!" at us and we have a few group wipes.

We get to a point where the tank decides to rant at us about how he is not specced for tanking and "has no points in defensive". We of course figured that he was a bad tank and he confirmed it for us by telling us this. We tell him that he was a bad tank(which he honestly was) and he goes off on a HUGE tirade about how we were typical spoiled Americans and how everyone in the world hates us. So we decide that enough is enough and we boot the tank. Sadly the healer had had enough and dropped group. The three of us were sitting in the instance not that far from finishing the run and we decide that we can finish it without having to go back to Shattrath and spend who knows how long looking for a tank and healer. My spriest guildee puts on what little spirit gear he has and we pull in a level 70 hunter friend and summon him to the instance. 

The hunter pulls out his turtle pet and misdirects to it and we proceed to not only clear all the trash leading up to the last boss but we also manage to down the boss. Afterwards we all laughed at how a hunter pet was able to hold agro better than that warrior. Since that run, we often joke about having points in defensive and when we need to CC something we'll tell someone to lock it down fukwitz! So that's a fun story for you all from the olden days of BC. Hope you all enjoyed it.