Guest Post: Gaming With Your S.O.

Howdy.

I was reading my excessive list of blogs I check daily at work and noticed they were looking for guest posters during the vaca. (I really do hate that word, but it’s so easy to use.) I thought I’d drop my hat into the ring as it were so here I am!

I guess I should introduce myself a bit prior to getting to the meat of what I’d like to discuss with you fine readers today. I’ve been playing WoW since the early days, November 26^th, 2004 is when I created my account and my very first character was a Night Elf Warrior. Rawr. I dabbled through vanilla, and managed to get myself to around level 43 and quit cold turkey for a good year. I would have had a nifty zergling or panda pet as well but I really despise a certain gaming establishment that sold my copy of the original CE I had paid for, but that’s a story for another time. No hard feelings. Really. No, really.

Anyway.

Way back when I started to play my significant other started to play with me. We both bought the game, made some Night Elves because they were cool looking and went on our way. She took a break about half a year before I did, and then I took my good long break.

We picked the game back up when BC was released and I created a hunter at that point. She a druid and we went along our ways and played through BC to Wrath. Long story slightly less long, today I am an official alt-a-holic. I have four 80’s and turned out to be a raid leader in the guild I’m currently in. She’s also amassed a number of 80’s under her belt and we both have a good selection of people to choose from to play.

That said, I read a lot of WoW related blogs as I stated above. Some of the ones I read often have posts about their spouse who plays with them and it got me wondering. Are she and I alone here, are we one of the only couples I’m aware of that when they play a game together, such as WoW, we don’t actually play together? We sit three feet apart from each other, and we talk and we even raid and instance on occasion.

But during the entire 1-80 process for our multiple characters we never actually grouped. Is that odd? Seems normal to us and fits us I guess since we do it without a problem but I always wonder, are we just the weird people, and every single other person out there does that?

I guess it’s enough that we raid and run heroics together. I mean, I see her a lot. We both work for the same company, more or less the same hours and same days off. She’s not remotely a bad player, not someone I wouldn’t want to bring on a raid. Are we doing something wrong here? Is it chaos? Cats and dogs sleeping together sort of chaos and end of the world…ness?

I personally feel it works out. We live together, spend a lot of time with each other and our friends but in game we get our “alone” time as it were. We get a nice little MMO-Break from each other. I think that’s a good thing in a way. We don’t really fight, or argue we still get our work done and our house clean and the dogs and cat fed. So it must be good, right?

What do all of you think?

Those of who play with your significant other. How do you do it, do you two constantly group/party up and does it work out? I wonder.

Seri sez: I am Henri(etta) the tank, I am.

This week, I embark on a grand adventure. I’ve faction transferred my old warrior and, in the immortal words of Malcolm Reynolds, “I aim to misbehave.” Why should you care? Well, there are insights to be learned about tanks that can only be learned by walking a mile in their steel-toed boots. Or hooves, depending.

Anyhow, it’s been a really long time since I played this character. She’s 70, but it’s been eons since I touched her. (A year, if not more.) When I logged her in, she had no spec and I wasn’t reasonably certain I remembered what even a quarter of her buttons did. Needless to say, I have my work cut out for me. But, with some help from Tarsus and the Panzercow, I have a nice fresh spec and am reasonably certain I will know which buttons to push when I venture out of Warsong Hold. Eventually.

What? Don’t look at me like that… there’s a lot to do when you pick up an old character! So, maybe I’ve spent about 90% of my time on her shuffling her between the bank, the mailbox and her trainer. It’s been productive! She has heirloom shoulders, breastplate and trinket. She has a spec, her bank is… partly sorted… and I actually gained a point of Blacksmithing from mats I had in my alt bank. Also, Cold Weather Flying! See? Productive.

Don’t judge me.

What may make this exercise all the more entertaining is that I’ve decided to level as Protection. I’ve heard Northrend is a lot of fun for Prot Warriors, so I’m going to give it a whirl even though some might think me crazy. The way I figure… I haven’t tanked anything for so long that the more practice I can get between instance runs the less likely I am to make an ass of myself (or more of one than usual) while grouping. I wouldn’t bet on it but… that’s the theory.

I’ll check in periodically to share my insights with you. In the meantime, do you have any anecdotes to share about standing in the front instead of the back? I’d love to hear them.

Jov sez: 3.2 Changes (the ones I care about, at least)

Rumor has it that 3.2 is going to be going live at the same time as this post.  We’ll see if that works out.  But!  I like to cover my bases, so…

The Cliff’s Notes version, reverse excitement order, blah-est to yay!-est:

• Crusader’s Coliseum — New 5/10/25/dailies, yadda yadda yadda
• Changes to raid instances: 10- and 25- mans now have both heroic and normal settings; Dungeon and Raid IDs can now be extended, each extension doubles the lockout period (so Ulduar goes from 7 days to 14, Onyxia goes from 3 days to 6, etc.)
• PoH gets a nerf (approx 17%, the nerf hitting harder as your SP goes up)
• Penance gets an increased cooldown (12 seconds, up from 10)
• MP5 gets a huge buff (mp5 on items is doubling)
• Soulbound items have a “cooldown” period, wherein they can be traded (I think that came about purely in response to our usual master looter and the infamous number of “put in a ticket and blame me” miss-loots. >.>  E-HARTS)
• Emblems are changing, moving back to a more TBC way of doing things.
• Buncha changes to the UI essentially duplicating the effects of addons like Ratings Buster, SellFish, etc.
• Children’s Week in Dalaran — Wolvar and Gorlock pets ahoy!
• Zeppelin from Thunder Bluff to Orgrimmar, negating the need for the run across the Barrens at lv 1-15 (About fscking time!)
• Riding at 20 for 4g, Epic riding at 40 for 50g, Flight at 60 for 600g, Epic flight gets faction discounts (my alts say Hallelujah!)
• “The local Postal Service has grown tired of walking so far each day to collect mail and has decided to install a large number of new mailboxes in Stormwind, Undercity, Darnassus and Orgrimmar.”  (asdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdf YES WHY DID IT TAKE YOU 5 YEARS?!?!?)

Okay, so, Cliff’s Notes. On to the details:

I don’t care about the Coliseum.  I’ve covered this already.  The fact that I additionally need to JOUST to participate makes me just want to kill it in a wad of flaming snot.  This elf-troll-girl-whatever DOES NOT JOUST.

If it was unclear before, I am actually looking forward to several of the changes which won’t actually do anything for my mains, simply because they’re generally the kinds of stupid changes that totally just make sense.  Alliance gets a boat from Darnassus to Stormwind, negating the death run across the Wetlands (oh, death run across the Wetlands…  How I do not miss you) so it’s kinda a no-brainer that they’ve finally added the equivalent to take care of the death-run across the Barrens for the Horde.  Likewise, actually putting MAILBOXES in more than one or two random-ass locations in the capitals?  Totally awesome in my book.  I’ve long held to the superiority of Silvermoon as a Horde city primarily because there’s a mailbox on every corner (and sometimes two).   And, finally, the changes to mounts are unadulterated awesome.  Old-Azeroth content is one of the weakest aspects of the game, at current.  Once you’re out of the belf/draenei noob zones, with the exception of Dustwallow, you’re in the land of “run over there and bring me some of that” when “over there” takes an hour to get to, and “some of that” never actually drops.  They’ve increased the rate of XP (especially after Heirloom gear) so it’s nice to see they’re increasing the speed of it as well.

I’m honestly kinda meh on the changes to Badges.  It definitely makes it easier to play catch-up, since the gear curve isn’t going to be quite so steep at this stage in the game, but while they’re still BoP (as opposed to BoA.  Damnit, I want BoA badges, blizzard!) I’m probably going to continue using them the same way I am now; I don’t need the gear they offer, so I’ll just keep buying heirloom gear for alts and stuff I can sell on the AH to re-make my raiding repair bills.  This change doesn’t affect me, I really can’t bring myself to care much.

I’m actually most interested in the general changes to raid instances.  The infinitely-extendable lockouts can be a good thing or a bad, depending on how they’re used (specifically, on later-instance bosses you just need more time on, because getting to them takes up half your raid week).  This, coupled with the ability to trade soul-bound items for a limited period of time kinda fall under the point above about changes that make a stupid-amount of sense.  Neither are game-breaking, they don’t affect the size of your e-peen (yes, you can clear all Ulduar in 2 raid days, we need 4, but only have 3 per week.  Have a trophy.)  They make it easier for Blizzard GMs (not having to wade through all the “oops, miss-looted” requests, leaving them time to deal with more important issues) and the more casual raid groups.  Like the badge changes, you can say they’re continuing to dumb-down the game, but it doesn’t really break anything.  And, also, as far as the badges go, at least, you can argue that they’re just matching the dumbed-down levels of the previous expansion.

And finally, priests are being nerfed. It sucks, but they’re pretty OP at current.  Blizzard has always said that when you bring one class at the expense of another that does the same job, they need to normalize, which is the position Priests (holy, specifically) have been in regards to current Hard Mode content. I’m going to probably get a lot of hate-mail for this, but it’s a needed and expected change. (And priests are STILL pretty OP, just less so.)  The PoH nerf (if you’ve not read the post linked above, do it now.  Derevka at Tales of a Priest handles the numbers of it very well) is not really that big a deal.  The CoH cooldown was a much more noticeable difference. Holy Priests aren’t going to be losing raid spots over it, at least not the spots they were taking at the expense of other classes, at least.  Penance cooldown was increased by effectively 1 GCD, which is one more shield, one more ProM, one more flash.  I’ll fully admit to not being a Disc priest and not having a firm grasp on the effect, but 1 GCD really doesn’t seem like that much.  I’ll reserve comment beyond that.

So, yeah, 3.2 today?  Next week?  Next month?  All I have to say is Arthas better come soon.  Coliseum is pretty ho-hum.

Jov sez: Why I’m looking forward to faction-transfers.

While I don’t  have as strong a case of alt-itis as Seri, I have been known to…  dabble… in character creation.  Okay, I’m addicted to it, and stubbornly roll healing class after healing class after healing class.  And don’t get me wrong, I don’t play most of the characters I roll.  Nothing against them, but a lot of them were either to take advantage of free realm transfers to clear up space on my home server and they were essentially retired and unplayed anyway, or they’re characters I’ve rolled to play with friends on other servers, who have flaked or had difficult to match schedules or the like.  Some…  I don’t really remember why I rolled, probably to peek around at the RP (since they’re almost always RP realms unless I’m rolling for a friend) and still there because I’m not at character cap.

My home server…  is full.  Specifically, it’s full of horde goodness.  The only lingering traces of Alliance on Scarlet Crusade are my first priest, who I am still admittedly suffering from major sentimental attachment to, and my druid.  My druid is a lv 70 druid, and damnit, I don’t want to level another from scratch.  I played her off and on from about the time I rolled my priest.  An was a paired character, Vie was the character I rolled to see if I could do this game all by myself.  An had strong ties to RP and other members of her guild.  Vie was played as being in-character as needed, but never really strongly caught as a character for me.  An will always be alliance, and may be played eventually, but primarily is used to keep up with my friends on that side of the fence.  Vie…  I miss playing, but I miss the system of support I have hordeside more.  Not to mention, hordeside she’s pretty much guaranteed epic flight, which is SO not happening if she stays alliance.

In short, I want faction transfers to happen NOW, primarily because I really really want to play my druid again.  I miss her.  I miss the boom, I miss the zoomrawr, I miss the tree-dance.  My name is Jov, and I’ve got an alt-problem.

Seri sez: I am what I am.

Retrospective posts seem to be the order of the week around the WoWBlogosphere, and this is no different. I have so many great memories from both classic WoW and BC that when I sat down and went through my screenshot collection I was just overwhelmed. But as I sit here looking back, I also have my eye to the future and what the expansion holds for me. I thought perhaps you might like to get a glimpse into the evolution of Seri. (And yes, these are all screenies of my actual characters!)

It all began with a Forsaken Priest. I came to WoW from EQ, where my favorite chars were a Cleric and a Ranger. I thought healing was the best thing ever, so when I got together with my spouse (though we hadn’t married yet back then!) and some buddies to play WoW, I rolled a Priest on Blackhand. Sadly, this char only made it to level 25 or so because my interest in playing was somewhat greater than Mr. Seri’s. Also, our leveling buddies swiftly out-leveled us because we were only playing a few nights a week.

It’s probably a bad sign that such is a rather alien concept to me now.

Once I was playing WoW more often (and had fully made the switch from EQ) I rolled a warrior on Whisperwind, where a bunch of folks from my EQ guild had settled. Why a warrior? I’d tried warriors in EQ but found it frustrating to do much of anything without a healer around. Warriors in WoW are much different, and I initially liked mine a lot. Although I have always had a horrible case of alt-itis, I leveled this char all the way to 40-something before my next big distraction came around: Roleplaying.

I started a new character on Scarlet Crusade shortly after it first opened, because as a long-time Roleplayer I wanted to see what Roleplaying in WoW was like. I don’t remember why I picked Mage for my first char on SC, but… it stuck. I started out playing there one night a week, but over the course of a few months I was hooked and eventually made the swap full time. I loved the flavor that Roleplaying added to the game, and I met a lot of new people that made my journeys through Azeroth so much more engaging. I began to write stories about my characters and build backgrounds for them. What fun! My Mage was my first 60, and the first char I ever raided with. Of course, this was back when raiding Stratholme and Scholomance was all the rage. Yes, that’s right… we used to take 10 people in there at the same time and thought it was challenging.

I also made my first foray into larger scale raiding with my Mage. I joined a community raid group (with Jov and some other folks from our guild) and took my first steps into Zul’gurub; I still remember how nerve-wracking that first trip was. Little did I know what a big role raiding would play in my future, once I got used to it! My Mage made it as far as MC before I just lost interest in her. Part of it was having someone who had become a good friend to me quit the game, and part of it was an inferiority complex regarding another good friend who is hands down the best Mage I have ever had the fortune to play with. Have you ever met someone who just got their class on a level so high that you felt completely and utterly outclassed? Yeah, that was me. I’m sad to say that even when I picked up my Mage again in TBC I just couldn’t make a connection with her. She never made it past 66.

Leaving the Mage behind wasn’t terribly hard, because I was completely and utterly enamored with my Druid. I had leveled her quietly after my Mage hit 60, just for something to do and because Druids seemed neat. Little did I know! I don’t remember having as much fun leveling any char as I did leveling this one, and it was mostly solo at that. Somewhere in the 50′s I developed a crazy fondness for Balance. This was before Moonkin form, even. I was Balance before Balance was cool. When I started raiding with my Druid, it was pretty much game over for my Mage. She quickly turned into my main and was for a long time… probably the longest of any of my mains to date. With her I saw MC, BWL, AQ, Naxx… all primarily as a healer because that’s what our raid group needed. It was my Druid that taught me to love healing again, after so much time spent doing other things.

It wasn’t until BC launched that I went back to my Boomchicken ways, and I remember being just blown away at the difference in how the spec played with the new talents. Over the course of my Druid career I did it all… caster dps, melee dps, tanking, healing… I loved being a hybrid, someone who could fill any role even if tanking was not my favorite thing to do. (By this time I had transferred my old Warrior over to Scarlet Crusade and finished leveling her.. if I needed a tank, I tended to prefer to use her!)

And then a funny thing happened. Ok, well, it wasn’t particularly funny but as my interest in raiding became more dominant and my interest in Roleplaying dropped to pretty much nil I decided to join a raid guild. Well, to be fair, I was already a member of said raid guild, but it was a Horde guild and I was just a part-time raider. I decided to take the plunge, make the switch and be a full time Horde raider.

I had created and leveled Seri back when BC launched, leveling her alongside a friend who had basically made a swap to full time Horde. (I mentioned the alt-itis, right?) It was a part time gig for me, much like my Mage dabbling back when I was test driving Roleplaying. The result was similar too. My enjoyment of my Priest came to rival my enjoyment of my Druid, to the point where I was able to set my Druid aside and fully embrace la vida Priest(a).

The rest, as they say, is history.

Now, here I stand at another crossroads. The dawn of a new expansion is a time when raiders think about shifting roles and doing something different. Although I still love healing (and my Priest), I feel like the time has come to do something different for a while. And so, on this day when we all (or most of us, presumably) take our first steps into Northrend, I’m going to be taking my first steps with my Rogue instead of my Priest.

Why? I like to stab things. But, more than that, after playing a healer for so long playing a Rogue feels rather liberating. The only buffs I have to worry about are self-buffs. I don’t have to rez anyone (jumper cables not withstanding). No one complains that I didn’t heal them fast enough to keep them alive. In general, my having an off night shouldn’t mean the raid wipes on farm content all night. It sounds like Nirvana to me.

But fear not, gentle reader, we’re not going to be turning World of Snarkcraft into the Holy Priest and Rogue hour. I still have a lot of love for my little Priest, and I’ll continue to share my Priest/Healing knowledge and perspective with you every Thursday. I hope that you all have as much fun leveling to 80 as I intend to. Just remember, as you venture out into the world of launch day queues, crashes and highly competitive questing, the best way to tag a mob when there is a lot of competition is SW:D.

Jov sez: Sappy Sentimentality, Just in Time for Wrath

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a horde re-roll.  Specifically, Joveta was created in March of 2008.  Before that, I’d been playing an Alliance priest, druid, and sundry other alts since March 2005, and all of that time was spent in the same guild, playing with the same people.  It was an RP guild, and a family.  WoW was my first MMO, and almost my first computer game.  I had no idea what I was doing.  They taught me what instances are, donated cloth and greens to help me level my tailoring and enchanting, and some even chipped in for my first mount.  They taught me how to play, not just how to heal, but how to exist in a MMO world.

I was bit by the raid bug in December 2005.  A community group made up of members of small RP and Friend and Family guilds took me in, and I healed my way through every encounter in Vanilla WoW excepting C’thun and Naxx.  They had patience with me when I dabbled in the darkside about a month before TBC’s release.

Like many others, the release of TBC was a time of upheaval.  For several months, my guild had been slowly bleeding members.  We didn’t actively recruit, and the slow trickle of people moving on, leaving the game, and other things outpaced the influx of new members.  TBC’s release exacerbated the problem.  We went from regularly having upwards of 20 people on a night to 5-10.  People went hordeside, or found new guilds, or stopped playing.  It was alright, the people I still saw were some of my favorite people in the game, and the guild remained a family to me.

When we started raiding with an alliance made up of friendly guilds leftover from my time raiding pre-TBC, some people began logging in again, but we lost much of the feel of the guild as we became less an RP guild that raids than a feeder guild to gear up and app to raid guilds.  It was disheartening to myself and others, and all of the people I was closest to decided around that time to make their horde characters their mains.  I took the plunge, rolling a blood elf priest (for the better quest zones and the mount.  On their own, I actually dislike blood elf models and animations) hoping that playing my favorite class would provide incentive to actually level.  At the time, I had no real intention of raiding in this expansion, though I joined the raiding guild all my friends were in as a Friend/Family member.

I went on my first Hyjal run in early July as a spot-filler, still wearing late-Outlands blues interspersed with a few Kara epics.  I must have done something right, because by the end of the month I was moved from our Friend rank to a trial raider.  With my friends horde-side, I’ve cleared all of T6 content excepting Kil’Jaeden, who I expect to drop (his pants) tonight.  (edit:  He did.  Go team!) I love everyone in my guild dearly, though sometimes I do get sappy missing all the people and characters I knew over my time in WoW.

• Yuki:  You took some noobs under your wing back before any of us hit lv 30, and from that time we never did a raid or instance without you.  You taught me to not-suck, and you were some of the most fun RP I had across multiple alts.  I only wish you played horde on Scarlet Crusade instead of Feathermoon.
• Kat:  I know I still talk and banter with you regularly horde-side, but I miss the goggles, engineering, and boomchicken shenanigans we got into over the years.  I hope your plans work out for the best.
• Karwyn:  A tauren with a ring on the horn is awesome, but I often miss the night elf in skank plate, monster-sized BWL shield, and braid permanently affixed to the boob.
• Oreo:  Your relentlessly cheery disposition when faced with adversity coupled with your amazing talent on any character you choose to play makes me feel honored to be your friend.
• Sami:  Many names, many characters.  I know it sometimes feels we snark more than talk, but you’ve always been there for me.  I only hope you can say the same for me.
• Naimh and Eirik: I don’t know where you transferred, and I’ve not seen you since well before TBC’s release, but you two always made me smile.
• Dudds:  Thank you for always carrying around your Wrath set to change into at a moment’s notice.
• Everyone else:  I’ve not always been the easiest person to get along with, but to those I rarely see:  I miss you all.  To those I still see:  I love you all.  To everyone reading:  I thank you all.