The Rosary

While I grew up catholic, it has literally been years since I had been to the crux of catholic existence… the rosary.  Somehow my wife who was raised Baptist has never actually attended one at all in the over 16 years we’ve been married (or two decades we’ve been together).  Under normal circumstances this would have been a disorienting experience, but last night it was made doubly so by a weird quirk of the modern church.  It seems as though there is a massive priest shortage currently in the church.  Quite simply put very few individuals enter the priesthood in America, and this is really no big surprise given the negative image of the church over numerous sex scandals.  I am not adding commentary here, just stating the fact that there is a massive shortage of priests.

As a result since the retirement of the priest I grew up with, they briefly had a priest designed to “reinforce catholic doctrine”.  Father had many quirks, one of them was a refusal to have “special offerings” for the various causes of the Catholic church.  Apparently lately there have been no less than three passing of the plate for various causes, so I can see why he refused to do that crap.  Anyways since the reformer priest, they have cycled through a series of priests, none of them native English speakers.  Each one seemingly harder to understand than the last one.  The catholic church is thriving in other parts of the world…  just not here in America.  So when you take what would have already been a confused experience and add in severe language issues…  it was all my wife could do to keep from laughing.

For starters each time the priest would say a “Hail Mary”, he sounded like he was bored with the prayer.  As a result he would begin running his words together and mumbling.  So this produced all sorts of interesting things.  After the Rosary I got together with my cousins and we all compared notes on what we heard.  I personally thought he was saying something about a “Roma Tomato”, one of my cousins heard “Fruit of the Loom” and another something about “flushing the toilet”.  It reminded me of a time when I was at my wife’s church, and the preacher had an extremely thick accent.  We kept thinking he was talking about “Bastard’s For Christ” instead of what we found out later was “Ambassadors for Christ”.  The problem is once you hear it…  you can’t un-hear it… and while I knew by memory the words he was trying to say, I had no less trouble making them out.

So long as he was sticking to prayers I knew I was mostly okay, but there was a period where because of his respect for my grandmother…  he went completely off script.   The words I did manage to grasp, seemed to be meandering and completely off focus.  He was talking about how some people live to be 100, and most people live to be 60.  Which I thought was an odd statement considering the vast majority of the people in front of him… were well over 60.   Thankfully all of us managed to make it through more or less with a straight face.  The only thing I am certain of is that we have a new florist.  The shop we used to use is no longer in business, so we tried the spouse of a person my wife teaches with.  She did an amazing job and produced two gorgeous arrangements for a more than reasonable price.  It’s always good to have a florist at the ready.

Ding 60… and 90

Yesterday during the day I spent a good chunk of my time streaming and playing World of Warcraft.  With the release of Reaper of Souls last night at midnight, and the upcoming headstart of Elder Scrolls Online… I really wanted to get my mage to 60 so I could perform the boost.  Going into the day I was sitting at 57 so just a stones throw away from the finish line.  I spent most of that time chain running dungeons, and if you are phenomenally bored you can watch almost the entire adventure on my twitch stream.  A few odd things happened along the way.  Firstly I ran into a guild called Combat Wombats… which in itself is not that interesting.  What I do find interesting is that they are apparently not connected at all to the guild by the same name run by several of my blogger friends.  I threw out a few names, and the two members of the guild didn’t have a clue who I might be talking about.

Second interesting thing is that I reached a point of equilibrium where I maybe didn’t suck at magery as badly.  In fact for quite a while running these dungeons I was pretty damned high on the damage meters and overall damage done.  I felt like I had grasped the basics of playing frost and was ready to move on to bigger and better things.  When I dinged 60 and took the boost to 90 I went from being confident to being completely confused.  In the 30 levels that I skipped over, I had more than doubled the number of buttons I had to keep track of.  Firstly I found it extremely disorienting to have my hotbars completely replaced without being prompted.  At least when I took the jump to 80 from the scroll of resurrection, it asked me if I wanted to have them rearrange my hotbars.

After deconstructing them and trying to remember what I had on each of the buttons, I realized that I had way more buttons than places to put them.  This is the problem with boosting.  In those 30 levels the way a mage plays changes drastically, and I am sure this happens for all of the classes.  So while I felt extremely comfortable playing a mage before the boost, afterwards I felt like I was a complete and total “nub” again.  I scrounged around and found a complete set of timeless isle gear between the banks for a few characters.  Complete in the pieces of armor, as I was missing 1 ring, a necklace and two trinkets.  However this took my overall gear score to 491 which I felt was better than most of the boostards would be.  As a test I decided to queue for the first stage of Throne of Thunder.

While I was not the lowest dps… I was really damned close.  There is so much going on, that I felt completely lost in trying to figure out when I should do what.  I like all the other boostards did things backwards.  After realizing I was in over my head, I did a little bit of research and I think for the most part I have a grasp on what my priority should be for casting.  At some point in the next few days I will try the next part of the LFR to see if my overall numbers improve.  I would run a few heroics, but quite honestly… I find LFR to be far less confrontational when you are not sure about how you are doing.  I can almost always do better than the worst player, so that gives me the leverage to learn on my feet rather than being called out in a 5 man group.

Pugs Aren’t All Bad

I had another interesting incident happen yesterday, that is making me feel like I need to re-evaluate my stance on pugging.  Starting to think that maybe I should even start trying to tank them some more.  In all of the dungeons I have run on my mage to get to 60, I had very few situations where things did not go well.  More than that, I have had a few incidents happen where folks have been genuinely awesome.  Yesterday in the middle of a Lower Blackrock Spire run, I ended up meeting a pretty awesome druid healer.  Throughout the course of the run we chatted back and forth, and when for no apparent reason half of the party bailed on us, we hung out for a bit while waiting on the queue to fill.  She said she was waiting around on a call from the vets, and was hoping to get a few dungeon runs in the meantime.

Since she was on a timeframe, I told her that she should drop group and should be able to get an instant queue.  She thanked me, and we went on our way… thinking that I would never see this player again.  Turns out there were really only a few people queuing at that time of the day, and when the queue popped I was in another LBRS group with the same healer.  We had a really good druid tank to work with, but he admitted straight up that he didn’t know his way around the zone.  So I helped shuttle him through the content, giving him a few tips on nasty pulls.  We wiped a few times, but overall everyone stuck with it and we managed to complete the dungeon.  Over the course of the run the healer talked about coming back to wow and wishing she could find a good guild to run with.

After the conclusion of the run I gave her the spiel on House Stalwart.  Went over our three rules, and a bit of background information.  Once again I didn’t really expect anything to come of it, but within thirty minutes she had rolled a priest on Argent Dawn and pinged me for an invite.  So as frustrating as pugs can be, I guess there are some genuinely nice players just trying to get through the game as well.  I went into the dungeons not expecting anything more than experience, and ended up walking out with a new guild member.  Considering just how many of my current guildies are people who I met through dungeon groups… I really should relax my anti-pug stance and give it a shot now and then.  There are always going to be gems in the rough out there to be found.