Although I’ve not been playing as much, I have been thinking about WoW, and in particular what I want to achieve this year. With limited playtime I need to prioritise what I want to do in the game. And so, here are my WoW New Year resolutions:

1. Get better at making gold on the Auction House
2. Level my Mage to 80
3. Finish questing in Storm Peaks and Icecrown with my Druid
4. See the endgame of Wrath of the Lich King and defeat Arthas

I’d like to achieve these by the time Cataclysm is released, and I’ve already made some great progress on the first one. I will of course report here as I go along.

Happy New Year (belatedly) everyone!

But I heard good things about the new Dungeon Finder that was introduced with patch 3.3. People were saying that the groups were fun, that the gear matching meant that you ended up in a reasonably balanced group, and, most interesting of all, they were fast.

I will admit that it was with a certain amount of trepidation that I pressed the “random dungeon” button the first time. I had been waiting to see if a Guild group would want me, but most were raiding or busy, so I thought it was time to jump in and see how PUGs had changed. Plus the lure of a little Pug pet had a small amount to do with it…

I’m pleased to report that the dungeon finder is every bit as good as everyone has been saying. It took a couple of minutes for me to get assigned to a group, but then we were in and running. And because most people are trying to run as many instances as possible, there was barely a pause to buff before the tank was heading off towards the first pull. Thankfully I spotted the little icons on people’s character portraits so that I could suss out who the tank was or we might have been in a bit of a pickle! My first dungeon was the Temple of Ahn’Kahet, and apart from my letting the tank die once during a big pull where I couldn’t keep up with the healing, we charged through it. As we progressed the tank complimented me on my healing a couple of times, which really boosted my confidence. It took less than an hour, we killed all the bosses, no loot drama, and at the end said our goodbyes, left the group and were ported straight back where we started from.

I enjoyed it so much I went back and did another one! And even more amazingly I must have been raving about it because my husband logged in to join me for the second one as well

I’m pleased I ran these dungeons a lot of times with Guild groups, because I can just about remember the strats, and my experience has been that nobody stops to explain strats or make sure you know what you’re doing. In fact, my main challenge is the tanks racing ahead and getting out of healing range! I’m dreading the day my random dungeon ends up being The Occulus because I haven’t been there much (twice) and I get lost when I have to follow people in three dimensions! Plus I hate the healing mechanic on the green drake. But other than that, I’m a big fan of the new dungeon finder, and looking forward to many more groups with it

Apparently I do do PUGs! Who would have thought?!

I’ve thought a bit more about what made me uncomfortable with the whole moonkin thing, and I think it’s the competitive nature of dps. I know it doesn’t have to be competitive, but I have a very strong competitive streak (my husband won’t let me play Monopoly any more!), and I found myself quite disappointed that I wasn’t putting out more damage.

As a healer it’s easy to keep my competitiveness at bay. Everyone knows healing meters are fundamentally flawed and not to be relied upon, and as long as people are staying alive, and my performance in the meters is comparable with the other healers I am quite happy.

For some reason I felt differently about dps. I felt I should be doing better. I felt that I ought to contribute more. Some of it is obviously gear shortages, as I’m still mostly wearing my healing gear for Moonkin form. Some of it is just inexperience showing (one boss fight it took me half the fight to get in range to cast my little tree friends, which will have lost a lot of valuable dps time). I’m sure it will come with practice, and as I still intend to has a dual spec of Moonkin with patch 3.1 eventually hits, I’m sure I’ll get more practice. I think I need to lower my expectations a little of how much I can contribute as a Moonkin, at least in the short term, but I still feel much more valuable as a healer.

I’m sure when dual specs are implemented there will be some people who find themselves happy in either of their selected specs, and able to switch whenever needed. For me, I suspect I’ll be a tree as much as possible, keeping the moonkin option for solo farming or for those times when I want to do something with friends who already have enough healing.

One of the chaps in the group also plays a healer as his main. We’ve done some runs with him playing his dps Paladin so that I could heal, but he really enjoys healing and would like to play his healer more. So I said I’d have a go at playing dps instead, and for me that meant Moonkin!

With the help of another guildie I installed the Talented UI mod to make it easier to switch my specs around (I still plan to raid Resto), selected new Glyphs, dug a few pieces of gear with +hit on them out of the bank, and headed over to Moonglade to have a little chat with my trainer. Some gold changed hands, and I was suddenly a level 80 n00b!

My first impressions were that it wasn’t so bad. I still need to learn a bit more about spell rotations, and I needed to be a bit more aware of the strats than when I play healer. Healer is easy – I just need to know where to stand and who to heal. DPS is a bit more complicated as I need to know where to stand and who needs to die first. I don’t have a great memory for strats, so I’m sure I did loads of things wrong, but we got through Heroic HoL and a CoT timed run. I was pleased to be out-dpsing the tank, according to Recount, but I think I need to tweak my gear and my technique if I want to produce more dps.

I warned my friends that they might not want me to play Moonkin too much, as I might love it and decide not to heal on raids any more. I didn’t enjoy it *that* much, but it’s certainly something I’d do again in order to be able to group with friends. Providing they’ll put up with me, of course!

He’s so cute! Happy Birthday WoW

In a nutshell, it’s because I have no sense of direction, both in RL and especially in game. In game, even if I’ve been somewhere loads of times before, I still have problems finding the place.

I blame EverQuest. In EQ I was a druid, and druids were a class that could teleport. So I never needed to learn my way to places, I just needed to know where the nearest teleport was. And as I usually group with my husband, who has an excellent sense of direction, I generally just follow him.

And when I’m on my own, I constantly check the in-game map to make sure I’m headed in the right direction. Which doesn’t always save me.

A week or so ago I agreed to run through Shattered Halls with some guildies. I know Shattered Halls is one of the Hellfire instances, but rather embarassingly I managed to zone into both Blood Furnace and Ramparts before finding the correct entrance to SH! I don’t know which was worse – that I got lost like that, or that my guildies were not surprised!

My guild’s been struggling a little bit with the usual summer slowdown, combined with the general pre-expansion lethargy. We were just breaking in to 25-man content before the summer, having Gruul and Mag on farm, and having managed a couple of TK bosses, the first Hyjal boss and a couple in SSC. The Officers have done a great job keeping 10-man activity going over the summer, and even kicking off a series of attempts at the ZA timed run (we’re at 3/4 chests). We’ve got a joint raiding agreement in place with another guild, and the hope is that that will enable more 25-man content, but if I’m honest I think things are going to be a struggle until the expansion hits.

So my friend /whispered me this week to say she was leaving to join a different guild. She said she always regretted not having seen some of the level 60 raiding content pre-TBC, and she wanted to have the chance to see more level 70 content. Now of course this doesn’t signal the end of a friendship, by any means, but I expect it to mean I spend less time in game with her, as she’ll be wanting to do stuff with her new guild.

So this of course got me thinking. What are my priorities in the weeks that lead up to the expansion? Do I want to see more content? Or am I happy to just kick back and enjoy time with friends?

For me an MMO has always been about the friends rather than the content. If I’m honest I find raiding quite intimidating. I only do it when it involves spending time with people I like, when we have a good laugh and some fun. Despite being in a small guild on the US server, I did see a lot of raiding action pre-TBC, with a great bunch of people who ran Molten Core on a Saturday morning (which was afternoon for me). We worked our way through the content, had a laugh at the same time, and I didn’t make too much of a fool of myself There was content I never saw – Naxx, and content I only touched on (two visits to Blackwing Lair, and never saw past the second boss). Do I feel I missed out on something? No. I’ve never been a hardcore raider, and I don’;t have the time to be one. Will I be gutted when WotLK comes out and I haven’t seen Sunwell, or killed everything in SSC/MH? No, not at all. There’ll be new challenges, new questing, and new raids to try, with my friends.

Everyone plays the game for different reasons, and no-one is right or wrong in the way they play. But thinking about this has made me realise that my priority is the social aspect of the game, and I’m happy where I am