An Ordinary Day

You can tell that you live in a connected society when opening your inbox on a day like today, you are assaulted with dozens of automated messages from the various sites you have signed up on before…  all wishing you the most sincere Happy Birthday.  So apart from my wife, the first birthday greetings came rolling in from a chorus of mail bots over night.  I’ve tried not to talk much about real life here, saving it for mostly game based topics (much to the ire of some key individuals), but on a day like today I figured I would make an exception.

Makes you realize how small the world has become, as the well wishers start rolling in on every platform imaginable from facebook to email to IM.  Birthdays lose their lustre as an adult.  Gone are the elaborate birthday parties and the months of being told no because it was “close to your birthday”.  Forgotten are the party games, and the looking forward to gifts…  because chances are if you really really wanted it you’d have gotten it yourself.  What you are left with, however is probably the most important part of birthdays.  The realization that there are all these people out there, who genuinely care about you, enough to remember that you do in fact have a birthday, and stop for a moment in their busy days to wish you a happy one.

Stabbity to Sliceity

Over the last few days I have been helping one of my good friends who has always been a dagger rogue, try and build a Hemorrhage build.  The whole process has made me realize exactly how different the life of a stabbity rogue, as I call them, is from that of a Sword/Mace/Fist rogue.  First you have to have the background that I have raided as a rogue many times, but never ONCE played a rogue that used a dagger for anything other that part of a macro to equip it only long enough for an ambush.  I don’t like positional attacks, and in general I hate the stealth dynamic…  so the real question is why the hell did I play a rogue in the first place?

I’ve always modeled my rogues off of the Swashbucklers of those classic sword fighting movies.  As a result I have either played a combat swords build, or a hemorrhage build, both of which support that play style very well.  I guess I never really thought about the differences in the styles, until sitting down with someone I feel to be the most adept rogue I know, and going over the basics of how to play “hemo”.  I felt like Master Yoda, asking him to “unlearn” what he has learned. 

I’ve never claimed to know much about being a rogue, nor really excelled at playing one either.  There was a time when I could easily top the meter in “alt” runs, but most of it was by sheer brute force.  It was not until today that I realized that the two play styles are almost as different as say a Feral Druid and a Resto Druid.  Were I to sudden switch my focus to daggers, I would have to go through the very same “101” training to even know what abilities to use.  It is funny that five years into wow, I still learn new things on a regular basis.

The Ugly, The Bad…

This week has brought two drastically different raid experiences so far.  In Duranub, Tuesday night we had probably the hardest time we have ever experienced trying to pull together a workable raid.  It was nearly impossible to find enough healers to make the raid work.  Normally we run 6-7 healers on our 25 man raids, and this gives us plenty of healing across the board.  However last Tuesday we were able to pull together what could be best termed as 4 1/2 healers.  Within a few minutes of starting the raid, one of those healers got pulled away on a work emergency.

We sat there after Leviathan trying desperately to make things work.  We had one of our “retired” raiders, magically show up when needed and helped solidify the ranks enough for us to keep moving forward.  It was a very very bad night.  We only managed to get Leviathan and XT down, and when the fill in healer needed to leave we were forced to call it early.  It was far from our worst night, but it was very trying on the raid as a whole and caused by nothing but attendance issues hitting all at the same time.  The people who were there made a valiant effort, but at the end of the day we just didn’t have the oomph to continue.  The hardest decision a leader can make is knowing when we simply do not have the needed resources to keep going.

The Amazing!

Now we scan forward to last night, a night that I honestly thought I wouldn’t be able to raid.  Our little 10 man group is having the same regular attendance issues that our 25 man has been, but through some luck we managed to pull together a group with relative ease and get into the instance only 15 minutes late.  We have yet to actually EVER start on time, so only 15 minutes late, instead of an hour late, seemed like a breeze of fresh air. 

We had a pretty unorthodox grouping, including 3 mages…  but we made it work pretty well, even though we struggled with some DPS issues throughout the night.  Each fight seemed to take twice as long as normal.  Part of this was caused by the fact that the DPS warrior realized late into the evening that she had been in half tanking gear for the majority of the night.  The other issues seemed far less intangible, since the damage numbers didn’t look all that off. 

The amazing part however is how smoothly everything went.  The mood of the night was light, and we joked back and forth throughout the raid.  Everyone just seemed to do their jobs without prompting, and the night saw us clearing Flame Leviathan, XT-002 Deconstructor, Kologarn, Auriaya, and Razorscale in our 2 hour window.  This was by far our most successful night yet in the 10 man raid, and sets us up for attempts on Hodir first thing Monday night.  Auriaya caused a few false starts, but once everything fell together we downed her like she was on farm status with very few issues.

Change the Randomizer

For as much fun as we had, the main frustration of the night was not the low dps.  The annoyance du jour came from the fact that every single boss that night dropped Paladin and Shaman loot which quickly got DE’d.  Had we a shaman or paladin, this would have been a great night, but since we rarely if ever have them…  seeing those item drops just adds to the frustration of loot in general.  It would be nice if blizzard would change the way loot worked, so that only items usable by classes in the raid would drop.  I realize this would take alot of work, and change the whole dynamic of loot in general…  but isn’t it about time?

Blizzard made great strides with the addition of tokenized loot (set tokens/badges), and other games like Warhammer have created versions of universal loot in the “repairable” items system (ruined gear that repairs into something useable by your class).  I think it is time for one of these companies to truly push the paradigm to the next level and introduce “intelligent loot”.  So that if you come into an instance with a warrior, priest, warlock, mage, and rogue…  you would see an item usable for one of those 4 classes drop from each boss.  Granted there would be ways to game the system, but surely there has to be some solution available.  Nothing is more annoying than an otherwise amazing night tarnished by the fact that so much loot went to disenchant.