Token Female Gamer

Although I have tried a wide range of characters in World of Warcraft, I have not played a healer since beta. Strangely enough the two characters that I have leveled past fifty are both ranged DPS with pets (Hunter and Warlock). Clearly it was time to branch out!

The not playing a healer thing had a few different reasons, the most prominent being: (1) the changes to priests in beta broke my heart and I refused to play one ever again! and (2) my husband plays a holy priest as his main (making reason one very easy to uphold!). Since I enjoy playing WoW with my husband, playing another healer has seemed rather superfluous.

But recently the mood has changed around here. Husband of mine seems to want a bit of a healing break. Maybe he was jealous of my leet deeps, or he was feeling the urge to stray, whatever the case, he is happy to alt it up with me. So he is tanking while I am healing in our awesome druid duo. (Getting pick up groups has been a breeze!!)

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Its hard for me to believe that its already been over a month since my last WoW Rant. This whole moving my entire life from one house to the new one has taken up much more free time than I expected, but then most things take far longer than I expect. =P
That plus raiding four nights a week and my goal of reading one hundred books this year have left me bereft of almost all my spare time.

How do people do it??

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(Its such an awesome title how could I not run with it?!!? Probably should have been Monthly WoW Woes, but that certainly doesn’t roll off the tongue as well.)

DPS (Damage Per Second). The never ending quest for the all time highest damage output EVER. What is the DPS ceiling and how can I get there???

Since both of my World of Warcraft characters are DPS-centric, this question comes up for me often. My love-hate relationship with recount doesn’t help, as I can’t seem to get by without it, but playing with it is almost as impossible. Would I do better without it? Keeping track is eminently distracting. Though having such a clear display of ones performance (compared to everyone else) is highly motivating.

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Okay, so maybe not all woes, but all it is certainly time for my weekly WoW ranting. (Hmm maybe I should do this weekly, might be cathartic.)

Somehow I have gone from being mildly interested in raiding, to raiding consistently four days a week. Since the new dungeon came out, Ice Crown Citadel (ICC), I got invited to be a guest (Hunter) on a regular ICC10, which turned into semi permanent. Then my little guild started running an ICC10 (Warlock does guild runs) and we got invited as a guild to join an ICC25, which has been taking two days a week so far.

The guest gig currently has the best success rate, as it’s a more consistent set of people. Our guild is too small so we always have to pick up a few extra random people (same with the 25man run). But overall the challenge is exciting and succeeding is invigorating.

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This is something that has been circulating in some of the WoW Blogs I read occasionally. Even though I don’t consider this a World of Warcraft Blog (though it could easily become one!) I thought it might be a good way to pay my respects to WoW.

And respect it deserves. World of Warcraft: The Lich King expansion has probably been my favorite game of the year (2009). I know, it was actually released in 2008, but I played so much of the game this year, I think it fully qualifies. =)

I’m pretty sure that I played WoW more this year then I slept. And so I award WoW the “Better than Sleep” award. =)

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Aion is a newly released MMO where all the characters are angels, not that they call them that, but the world is populated with beings that can fly. From what I have read, flying is the thing to set this MMO apart, flying around the world, and even more importantly, flying combat.

Since at our house we like to try out many of the new MMOs that pop up, we couldn’t miss this one. And since I wanted to share, writing a diary of my daily Aion activities seemed the best option.

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…Finding them.

Once resigned to the fact that PUGs are necessary and need to be suffered, finding them becomes the challenge.

Sadly in World of Warcraft the Looking for Group function is horrible. It is incredibly limited and hardly anyone seems to use it.

On my server the big alternative is the trade channel. This channel is only available while inside a major city. Since it is literally the only channel that gets used with any frequency everyone joins it, the good, the bad, and the ugly. Imagine every PUG experience rolled into one very overused channel. It’s awful and I avoid it as much as possible.

Overall finding PUGs is not that easy, especially if you are a damage (DPS) class, as they tend to be a dime a dozen. Either you sit in town reading through agonizing trade chat, or you join the severely limited in game Looking for Group feature.

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One of the suggestions that I got from my WoW raiding 101 write up was that I hadn’t mentioned anything about PUGs and how those should affect peoples class role choices.

PUG – Acronym for the phrase ‘pick up group’ – meaning to play as a team with random people.

Pick up groups are something most aspiring raiders will have to deal with, especially in World of Warcraft as it is today. Unless of course gifted with a very dedicated set of friends to play with, or part of a large guild that has enough daily active members to provide frequent group and raid buddies.

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Final thoughts

Here we are, at the end of this (much larger then I expected) endeavor. I hope that it has conveyed enough information to help ease the transition into raiding (at least a little bit!)

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External Additions

This is a huge topic. The meta-game for WoW is already incredibly complicated, but the meta-game for the WoW-software dwarfs it by leaps and bounds. From new interfaces to smaller addons; a vast array of options are available. Then of course we can’t forget Ventrilo and all the hardware that that spawns.

Oh you could play without all these fancy gadgets and gizmos but they really help in so many situations by increasing response time, easier access to all raid members, alerts, maps, shortcuts, and so many more wonderful ease inspiring additions that playing without almost seems archaic. Granted on a bit patch day you will be playing without them, until they are patched anyway.

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