"wna heal brd, gt grp"

When I am playing on my Shaman, I can enjoy the silence, only being whispered by gold sellers. Which is really annoying, starting with "hello", which gets them a response like "No, I don't want to buy gold.". Report'd. But still, it's nice and quiet. Not because no one wants me to heal for them, but my guild has the reputation of not liking to PuG. We didn't know at first, until people mentioned that when they applied. But there was a time that I got spammed to go everywhere.

Nice, people begging you to go with them, to heal them. Problem is that they manage to whisper me when I am Enhancement. One of the Shamans from the top Horde guild at that time asked me to heal for him in Heroic Slave Pens. "No, I can't, I'm Enhancement", was my reply. No problem, he went to find a healer again. Next day, I get the same whisper from him, asking if I could heal Heroic SP. Again, I told him that I was Enhancement and that I didn't want to heal. Next day, he asked me again!

Now, forgetting something trivial like some stranger's spec is one thing. Forgetting it four days in a row, meaning that you don't listen is another. So I declined again, only to get the question again the next day. Now I was getting annoyed. After letting him off by declining to heal again, I started to think of a scheme I had on my mind a long time before those whispers.

When I thought of that plan, people were taking the healers for granted, only the raid leader and class leaders actually knew who was a healer. This was painfully obvious when a co-op raid between #2 and #3 on Horde side, both with MC on farm, wiped on Sulfuron Harbinger, due to setting an Enhancement Shaman on main heal duty (it wasn't me). Basically, the plan was to sign up as healer, while being specced differently. That never happened, I launched a "Healers are awesome" campaign instead.

So when I got whispered the next day, which was as expected, I told him that I'd heal. Unfortunately, they caught me before I managed to wipe them, which was probably a good thing. Enhancement gear looks alot better than healing gear.

But as our guild is known not to like terrible PuGs, people don't ask us for everything anymore. Exept for KZ pugs ofcourse (New guilds really need to talk to each other, not try to get the T6 guilds to help them). But on my paladin, I don't sport the Phoenix Legion tag yet. So, whenever I play, I'm bound to get asked to heal Sunken Temple (so awful... never again... hated that on my Shaman) or Blackrock Depths, which are both not the greatest instances. Added bonus: I'm playing Retribution.

But when I play World of Warcraft, I usually take the time to type out my sentences, often even using punctuation and proper capitalization. I don't like 13375|>34|<, nor do I like people that don;t take their time to write out their question if they want me to help them. When I ask someone to help me, I don't write "help plz". When I help someone with questions about the guild, I use proper grammar. Others don't. So if you ask "wnna heal brd, got grp", I'm not gonna come.

Just our luck

So, we're attempting Bloodboil. 17% on our first ever try, we're getting the hang of it and.... We get lag. ALOT of lag. Then the realm dies. Wait, the entire battlegroup is dead! It's a shame, we would have gotten him down tonight, netting us a 3rd (!!!) first kill this week. Damnit. Now we're just making Gnomes on Bladefist, all named Bob, or Bób, or Bobthebuilder, Bobcheese, Bobjaws etc. etc.

Wrath Beta and me

I am not in the Beta. And I'm happy that I'm not in the Beta, I don't like having things spoiled for me. So all that I know, when avoiding the nice parts of the news (meaning that everything but mechanics, nerfs and blatantly obvious things are passing by me), are what I can't miss or won't spoil it for me.

The first thing I heard was: Death Knights will be awesome. The second was that greens will look shiny. Then I heard that downranking got removed. I fell off my chair laughing. Simply because everyone is making/going to make a big fuss out of it. Exept for me, although I'm a healer at the moment. I'm one of those people that just plays the game, not worrying about nerfs and fixes. My Class Leader, on the other hand, doesn't. He is already trying to figure out the best DPS rotations in Wrath, etc. etc. So he is really bummed about it, while I am laughing my @ss off.

But that's not the part of the news which I like most. Neither is the fact that Agility is rumored to provide Shamans with AP instead of Strength, making Strength a stat for Paladins and Warriors. No, I like that Blizzard is looking into making unique items, like tabards and pets, retrieveable.
I like this because I was hacked a year ago, losing many tabards (I am a tabard collector) including the Argent Dawn one, the Dark Portal opening event one and the WoWTCG Tabard of Flame.

The chance to get those back is one that I'd love to take. The rest of the news: Meh.
By the way, I need to start inserting pictures again.

Teron Gorefiend is DEAD!

Yeah! Phoenix Legion killed him on the first try last night and thank DAVE I wasn't picked for construct duty by Teron. It was tense and Cowl of Benevolence dropped. Nice for the priest that got it. Nice, on to Gurtogg Bloodboil.

Free to play

As a member of various free to play websites, like AeriaGames, ijji.com etc. I sometimes get Beta Invites for their closed Beta's. Which can be fun, don't get me wrong. But not today. I got a mail from AeriaGames about their new game, croNous. I was in their Beta. Okay, let's try it out, if it's any good, I might have something to blog about.

After downloading the game, which took all morning, I got to play. Immeadiatly I saw the horrible graphics, tiny fonts and Chinese mythology which is the standard for F2P MMORPGs. You have four classes, being Fighter (how unusual), Magician (original.), Savage (Big Shiny mallet!) and Valkyrie. All were decked out in awesome armor, until you selected one to play with. I picked Valkyrie and I began. For a ranged class, you might expect that it has a ranged weapon. Even Hunters in WoW start with one.

And even after 5 minutes of play time, it was obvious that the only goal was grinding, as usual. That may work in Asia, but in Europe and the US, we don't really like grinding that much. But all free to play games have grinding in them. Even ijji's puzzle games. Some of my friends love it, 2 of them play Flyff and the other one is always playing a new MMO.

To the free to play publishers, it's normal to have ranks etc. like in Halo, where you get XP for every match won, which advances you to the next rank. It's only good for showing off, but even the simplest puzzle game has it. Okay, if you like that sort of thing, go enjoy it, but to me it feels out of place.

In games like Halo, it makes sense that you advance when you win. You do good, you get promoted. CoD4 rewards you with new and shiny weapons. But with puzzle games? Congratulations, you advanced to Sudoku Master by defeating iliekpuzzle999? New mouse cursor unlocked? +2 bonus to red blocks? Sudoku stat increased? It's just silly.

But then there are the fake games. Take SoldierFront for example. You need to stop terrorists from planting a bomb, by either killing them, defending long enough or defusing the bomb. Where have I heard that before. Oh, yes, Counter Strike. The only difference is that you have a stable connection, better graphics, nicer players (yes, really) and better maps in CS. Add one of those annoying item shops, where you pay real money to buy coins and then you buy items with those coins.

Which gives players an unfair advantage. I don't spend money on those F2P games, so I don't have a shotgun in WarRock, or improved armor in GunZ. It's just not worth it. Why pay money to play a hacker infested game with a QQ-ing player base?

Archimonde is dead. Yay?

Last night, my guild killed Archimonde. Only downside: I wasn't there. While I was playing Magic at a friend's place, they killed him. WoW and a life don't go together.

WoWjutsu hasn't updated yet, so we're still 21st on realm and 6th on Horde. Speaking of which, apparently I'm still Enhancement. I wish.

I can has Guest Post?

I've written a basic shaman guide for BBR over at Random Ravings of Warcraft, it's over here.

Larger post coming later today.

Victory (sorta), broken computers and spamming

I've been playing my Rogue deck again, after a long time and I actually won 2 out of 4 rounds at the local FNM. Which is nice, considering that I have never won a round before, let alone with a deck of which I forget half the abilities (I have to stop forgetting to put counters on my creatures... +1/+1 ones are good. Very good).

And now some bad news: My little brother's computer is broken. This means that I cannot play arena matches with him, cannot level our alts together or do dailies together. He wasn't too worried when it comes to viruses, even when his computer composed several songs solely by the antivirus's BIOS driven soundeffects. His computer didn't want to start anything other than his wallpaper, task manager is unavailable. The easy solution is to reinstall Windows ofcourse. Problem is that his version has some legality issues and that he lost the CD. Problem two is that he is too lazy to fix it.

Also, I went to Hyjal yesterday, with a mission: Get 1000+ Chain Heal casts. A raid usually lasts 3 hours, but this was an extra raid, which lasted 2 hours. I managed to get 821 casts in, landed higher on the healing done, percentually less on the overhealing one (higher on absolute numbers though. But then again, I did more healing), so I'm satisfied. If it was a 3 hour one, I would have had around 1400 casts, so... I think I pulled it off. I've got a guest post to write now, so I'll stop here.

So.... 5th place yesterday. Of the 8 contenders. Luckily I got to play the first round against my "nemesis", the annoying guy that doesn't know that basic lands are colorless, that mana burn exists and then starts to get angry at *you* for trying to teach him such things. Anyway, first round I had to take 2 mulligans, leaving me with 5 cards to begin with. Needless to say, he won. Second round went better, I had a good hand from the beginning and milled him to death. 1-1. The third round, I got a good hand and started milling him. He had 7 cards left, I had 2 Drowner Initiates and one Scalpelexis on the table. I casted a small Slippery Bogle, payed 2 extra and got him down to 3 cards. Then I attacked with Scalpelexis, removing the last cards. Instead of ending my turn, I used Jace Beleren's ability and everyone had to draw a card. I won. My goal was achieved.

Second match was played against Zyco (Yes, that is his actual name), a 11-12 year old of which I can't imagine him making his own decks. On top of that, he is the shopkeeper's pet. Anyway, we got playing, I had a good hand, played as usual. Until he started using Oblivion Ring on all of my good cards. Boomerang'ed it, then Cancel'ed it as soon as he tried to play it again. Only to have him trying again, but this time I didn't have any counterspells. While praying for a Boomerang, I drew a Fable of Wolf and Owl, which I played to get me a few blockers. Unfortunatly, he played a creature that removes a creature from play when attacking and the creature returns at the end of turn. In short, he managed to burn through my 1/1 Owl tokens faster than I could get them on the field. 0-1 for me.
Second round, I got off to a good start, managing to Boomerang and Cancel my way to turn 5, with a nice headstart on mana. In the end, I lost and he had 10 cards left.

Now our group, we were with 6 of our M:tG group, wasn't too happy with the smug little bastard winning. Luckily, Eliminator won from his own brother, placing him against Zyco in the finale. I had to play against Cold Hand, who has a better history of winning with his Elf deck than me. He managed to place second in the Shadowmoor release event at the store with a similar drafted deck. He also won last time's Gateway tournament. He burned through me twice in a row, as he has a very fast deck to begin with and in the later turns, his creatures just grow. The fact that he uses the oh so annoying Oblivion Ring too often ("How many do you have?" "Two. Oh, look, here is another one! I thought I only had 2 in there.") also works in his favor.

Once that was over, we went to see how Eliminator was doing against Zyco. After a very long battle, it turned out to be a draw, ending in 1-1. Eliminator won after the tie-breakers and we were happy, atleast it was someone from our own group. He took home 3 Eventide boosters and a M:tG jacket. We'll make him wear it everytime we come together to play, just like Eliminator with his cap.

Once Iron Man gets home, I'll have to make a vicious Treefolk deck with him (a bit of an oxymoron, isn't it?), but for now I'm waiting for my Sanity Grinding in the mail. Atleast they were impressed by my deck, it isn't worthless like the last decks.

Since my last real post, I've almost only worked, eaten and slept. Exept for Saturday evening, when a friend of mine invited us all to play Magic at his place. I got to test my new and improved "milling" deck. I won all of my matches, exept for one against one of the newer players. He claims that he got lucky, but I made some stupid mistakes, like casting a huge milling spell opposed to playing a creature for defense, which killed me. He had 14 cards left.

It's quite humorous though, to see the person sitting across the table getting more nervous as time passes. The entire group is scared of my deck, which isn't something new, as they get scared of strange things easily. Before this, they were scared of an infinite combo deck... Which was stupidly easy to counter. Tuesday, I'll have a good chance at winning the tournament, aslong as I don't fall asleep or get mana screwed. If I do well, I'll be going to the FNM with the same deck on thursday aswell.

I've finally gotten my mining back to level 325, which I neglected for a year, it's so boring. Yay!
Also, there is a scammer on Eonar, whispering guild officers with the "guild master's" fake bankalt, trying to empty the guildvaults. He tried that on our guild aswell. Problem is, he asked his girlfriend, he was sitting next to her and he was tanking Zul'Aman on his paladin at the time.
Also, goldspammers are taking on whispering people. Instead of just firing a selling spam, they start with "hello". So when a level 1 Blood Elf whispers me like that, the only response he gets is "no, I don't want to buy gold". If it was a player, he'd respond, but they remain silent.