Ulduar!

Fuck yeah! Comin’ to save the motherfuckin’ raid now!

Ulduar! 

Fuck yeah! Hard mode is the only wayyyy now.

Alright, so maybe I got a bit carried away, and Ulduar doesn’t deserve it’s own theme-song, but it’s a sad state of affairs when yours truly is so eagerly anticipating something, that I decide to break into song. 

You, my loving readers, are oh so lucky to have just experienced that. But, moving on.

Ulduar is just around the proverbial corner, and think the only thing that’s keeping my guildleader from wetting himself in ecstasy over the prospect of a completely new instance to violate is more than likely the same as every other major raid/guildleader out there – You know that it’s going to be a fleeting experience, like rubbing one out in the bathroom at work. Yes, it may make you feel good for that moment, but once you leave, you’ll just feel dirty, mellow, and also have an uncontrollable desire to raid the nearest fridge. 

Get it? I talk about a RAID instance, and then make a comparison that makes you want to RAID a fridge? Yeah? Y’get it?

Oh shut up. 

But it is inevitable. We’re seeing two instances in one as we did before – a ten and a twenty-five man (or woman, sheesh) version with the same basic experience in each. And the major point that Blizzard has been shouting about almost non-stop for the last few weeks? The fact that it’s loaded – LOADED – with ‘Hard mode’ fights. I’m resisting the urge to bitch more about it, but moving on. But the basic question that I’ve heard asked a few times, and in a few back-alley forums on teh internetz is “How long is going to last?”

Now sure, you’ve got the ten-man guilds out there that are still working in raid-alliances or whatever to be able to field a 25 man run for Naxx still, so there are those people that aren’t going to be going there anytime soon. But what of the ‘core’ raiding element in the World of Warcraft community? 

And I’m not talking about those SK Gaming fucks that are treating it like a second job. People may think that’s cool, but I’m sure as hell not one of them. Doing this stuff because you enjoy it, or you enjoy the company of your fellows is one thing. Doing this kinda shit because someone is paying you to do it, to be first in the world, country, state, zipcode, whatever, just seems to be too much like masturbation without the payoff to me.

 Days? Weeks? A few months, at the most I’m sure, before the place is just as much on farm-mode as Sarth 3D and whatnot. Then we wait, in annoyed silence, for our next blast of joy in the form of another content patch. So, I guess that everyone should sit down, kick back, and drink down this new instance the moment it comes to them.

Me? I’m going to pass. Too much like drinking Drain-o. Sure, it’ll clean you out, but it’ll leave you hollow inside.

As a side-note, I’m currently dying of the plague IRL, so my entries will be slowed slightly. I was hoping to put up a guest-post by a pvp-nazi friend of mine, but he sent it to me in a text-file, and I wasn’t feeling that productive.

And on the first day…

… Charnal descended among the unwashed masses bearing one very important commandment, as stern and unforgiving as a steel enema.  That commandment, mere mortals, is as follows:

“Verily, protect thy motherfucking healer, for thine own ass’th depend upon it.”

And thus, the unwashed masses cheered in happiness with the knowledge that their squishy yet cute healer classes would endure through any trial or dumb-fuck mispull. 

Yes, this is the world I wish I lived in.

Recently, when I had reached the point of no longer needing to do heroic or ten-man runs on Charnal, I decided to dust off my old mage, who had been my original main character back in the days of The Burning Crusade. Having taken him through the endless joy of T4/T5 content, I finally decided his days were numbered, and the poor man was ridden hard and put away wet for over a year.

But, as I decided that none of the other characters I had at 70 were of any interest, I got the mage back out, dusted him off, gave him a twenty for his rather rude and uncouth treatment, and off he went merrily nuking and teleporting about with gusto. Then came the point where I was able to go and do heroics and regular instances on him with (shudder) PuG players.

I’m sure that you all can appreciate the feeling of taking a back-seat on a role that you usually play. Inevitably, I was put through a series of PuG groups over the course of a few weeks, most of the time with not one familiar face in the entire party. This is always a difficult proposition at the get-go, regardless of your place in the group, be it healer, tank, damage, or other. However, when you are a tank in a squishy, soft mage body, hijinks are going to happen.

In most cases, I found one immutable truth: Most (Note, I said MOST) PuG tanks aren’t going to pay much attention to anything aside from what they’re tanking. Mobs start going all over the place, and in all cases that I’ve been less than impressed with the tanking, the moron will go about at his own pace, ignoring the mob that he was building threat on (which the dps are humping harder than an asian pornstar in an all-boys highschool), and instead is going about taunting, sundering, blowing, or doing whatever to get the attention of the mob on the loose. Suddenly, the rogue pulls agro. He vanishes. The mages iceblock automatically. Then there is the poor priest, who had been noticing his agro climb for the last 20 seconds, and was fading after every Greater Heal. The mob barrels down on him, while the tank is off picking roses with the other two mobs he hadn’t bothered to get agro on. The result? The priest reacting something like this : 

Splat goes the priest, the rogue has long since hit sprint and bailed, with both mages in fast pursuit, blinking and hitting their invis macro. The warrior, who hadn’t paid any attention to the threat meter (and don’t give me the excuse that not all people use them, they’re built into the fucking game now for fucks sake.) is now content that all three mobs are beating on him, but HEY. Everyone else is gone, and the priest looks like a used fluffer from a Ron Jeramy flick! The realization that he hadn’t paid attention to his mobs and the priest is only reinforced by the priest suddenly being called off to do a guild raid. On Sunday. At 11pm at night. 

And yet, all of this pain and suffering could have been avoided, if he had paid attention to his healer.

A perfect description? No, more than likely not, but you get my point, but just for the bads out there that may not take the point to heart, I’ll sum up.

WATCH OUT FOR YOUR FUCKING HEALERS. Even the snarky ones from Snarkcraft.