The definition of a cluster
You get:
One hour
One mage
One hunter
One warrior
One heavily armed, purpled-out shaman
One priest, you
Eight waters
Your shaman arrives first. You follow him up the chain and into the instance. In true form, he's fighting within seconds, and you're healing like a crazy person. The hunter comes next. He saves a big pull and all is well, but your warrior lags out and falls in the lava. He announces that he is lost. Your shaman goes to get him.
The mage arrives and all you three have to do is wait for the shaman and warrior to get back. So your hunter pulls three guys. He feigns, you sit and watch until you're sure it's not going to end well, then you run for the entrance, only to find out that not only did the mage make it out way before you, she managed to die out there. With like 800 people waiting to zone for BWL, so you can't find her corpse.
The warrior falls in the lava again.
The mage goes brb.
Shaman, hunter and you go back in and pull again. Plan is: you MC one guy, hunter traps another, shaman tanks, once MC wears off the hunter should... do something.
The MC wears off and the hunter announces that he will be carrying in some groceries.
"Is that okay?"
Nobody answers because you have about four mobs munching steady on your asses. You and Mr. Purple Shaman manage, with a potion and that one spell that gives you a free thingie (I can't remember the names of those whatever disc/holy spells), manage to live. Hunter gets back from putting the milk away and announces that you make this place look 3-mannable.
Warrior zones in. Warrior goes LD.
Mage returns.
The hour ends.
You do what anyone would do if they'd managed to get only three feet into LBRS on their first try: strip naked and dance for the now 1000 people waiting to zone.
SAMUS
It's a work in progress, but it's just so fucking kick ass already.
Hanging out with teenagers in the irc channel has reminded me what it is to know everything, to have it all figured out. What I wouldn't do for some of that now!
I'm increasingly aware of my ignorance in many areas of my life, lately. Parenting, of course, is the biggie. You always think you'll be that parent who won't even need to discipline your kid; a look askance will be enough to deter them from harm and wrongdoing. It doesn't work that well in practice, except on certain kinds of kids, with parents who are not you. Or me.
Even WoW. Some sad recent shit caused me to leave behind my sexy purple fart, my shadow spec. I liked being the only main priest in FoH to be specced shadow. Nobody expected much of me; I could always blame my bad healing on it; and soloing, which is what I do 97% of the time, was a snap. I'm in FoH not because I'm uber but because I went out to sushi with Furor and other FoH'ers of merit a few times, and I greased their proverbial slip-n-slides into the WoW beta. So I have the tag; it's very pretty, and people seem to respect it, plus I sometimes get to hear Furor yell at people, which is always fun when it's not me.
The other day, though, I logged on to an immediate invite to a raid. Curious, I took it, and the summon that followed, and found myself in a lake in Feralas. There was a big dragon waiting to be kilt, and we were the guild to do it.
Except, actually, we weren't. After we choked, Forgotten Aspects moved in, did their own choke, and then following our next choke, killed it themselves. While paging through my screenshots of the event, it may well be my fault, even though there was drama involving aggro by an FA guy, or something. The reason I blame myself?
You'll notice I'm wearing a blue dress. I received it at the end of a Valentine's quest line for helping an undead guy contact his lost love from beyond the grave. The blue dress is very pretty, sells to vendor for one copper, and has exactly zero stats on it. Hy wanted to see it, so I put it on for him, and promptly forgot to put my goddamn armor back on. I ran oom in about three seconds.
It's this kind of stupidity that follows me around in WoW these days. During an ubrs raid last week, I managed to dispel a friendly hunter trap, get killed several times, forget that I could cast Prayer of Fort on other groups besides mine, and ninjaloot that one skinning knife that, it turned out, everyone else in the raid desperately wanted. (Really, I rolled for it and won fair and square, but I hadn't trained daggers and so couldn't skin all the stuff in the dungeon. People were very, very sandy about it all.)
***
I've built up a reputation in FoH as the spoiled youngest sister who gets away with whatever she wants and doesn't have to do as much work because it's being taken care of by other siblings. But during that first dragon fight, other healers took notice of my lack of skillz. It became a problem.
So, on the way to the next dragon, everyone was feeling edgy and hateful and Edragonshade suggested, not entirely kindly, that I respec while in Orgrimmar. So he walked me through it and I'm now a disc/holy kind of girl.
I'm sure that it was my new leet healing powah that caused us to kick ass at the next dragon.
Here's a better shot of it, with some other guys taking a sorry crack at him:
Aren't these dragons just fucking gorgeous?
You can thank this guy:
***
You know that totally emo part in
Interview With The Vampire where whatsisface says that making another vampire took the last breath of him that was human? I sort of feel like that with Samus. I enjoyed not running out of mana during that fight. I felt like a veritable mana font, gushing forth with healing goodness. But that respec really took the last breath of Samus that was uber. I know, I know, if I want to go around shadowing people to death I can be a warlock, but I love being a priest. I love being able to get out of almost anything. I love scaring people at the door of an instance by sinking into my purple fart shadowform. I'll just say it: I love melting face.
It's sad, fighting solo now. There isn't much to do, and it takes a long time for things to die. Sometimes I log in, kill a few things in The Noxious Glade, say something silly in gchat, and wither in the silence.
***
Then, I log on to Samoo.
Samoo is my party character. She's a night elf druid, and she does not wear pants unnecessarily. If she isn't fighting, she isn't pantsing. She's level sixteen now, and she belongs to a guild called Showgirls of Stormwind.
Before you get all up in my grill, let me sexplain. The Showgirls are mostly low-level alts whose main purpose in life is to dance and get drunk in Stormwind, to flirt and be happy. This is just the antidote to my hardcore FoH blues.
Upon joining, I received a gold, a tabard, and a red guild snake in the mail as a welcome gift. A 300 chanter whispered that I should send her my stuff to make it glowy, and refused my offerings of money and items. I was dumbfounded. Samus has never had an enchant, because she can't bring herself to beg for them.
Samoo's only obligation is to dance in Stormwind on Saturday nights after 8:00 p.m. Here we are at the Darkmoon Faire outside Goldshire, drinking it up, last Saturday.
Almost makes it worth being a night elf.
Instead of posting the last couple of weeks, I've been writing to my brother. It's all stupid, pen-pal bullshit, nothing too heavy, because I don't know him that well and I don't know what he'll think. Putting letters in the mail for him feels like paying bills.
Which are piling up on me now.
Anxiety about nothing means it's bedtime.
Ever since I first rode my horse bones into Silithus, way back in beta, when it was populated only with enormous bones and distant, elite, buzzing hives many stories high, I wanted to find out what was behind the huge closed gates in the South. I heard rumors: that the gates could only be opened by multiple, high-level raids far in the future.
Then, over a year, two moves and one kid later, I heard tell that the time was coming. I made it a priority to be there yesterday when Sean banged the gong on Hyjal.
So, apparently, did a whole hell of a lot of other people.
It took seven server crashes before things really got underway. A lot of big Anubis things and their big bug pets stalked all over the place, and three gigantor bugs took up residence in the three big Silithus hives. I first went to check out a gigantor bug. Before I had ridden in close enough to even see the bug, I saw random alliance flying toward me. Literally. Dropped from the sky, to die at my feet. So I felt a natural affinity for the bug; obviously, he knew what to do with filthy alliances, right?
I got in close enough to see him, then, and he was a beaut.
If I look alone here, it's because I was. Everyone else had been thrown into the air. I knew that killing him would mean a big bag of loots for me, though, so I went ahead and threw a little DOT his way.
"Et tu, Samus?" he cried, and threw me away like so much stinky alliance. However, because he truly did love me, he gave me a chance: I landed, safe and sound, atop one of those creepy hive leg things.
All of Silithus laid out before me, I paused to take some photos, tucked my digicam back into my robe, hit levitate, and jumped.
Did I forget to mention the lag? At that time, there was about a sixteen-second lag on casts. I forgot to wait for it. Several seconds after reaching the ground, the server discovered that I was just broken, crunchy dead bones on the sand, and told me so.
***
After dinner, I joined FoH to kill some big Anubis fellows. I was no good at anything, but it didn't matter because other people were. Once everyone seemed to be sufficiently healed up, I just went shadow and DPSed the shit out of things. We all died, we all got yelled at, Sean flirted, and Behe told me he'd broken Slansin's eye during a loving, brotherly wrestling match.
I went to bed at 3:15. The Bug woke at 3:30. I slept in the rocking chair, fitfully, and took a nap today to make up for it.
***
All in all, it was disappointing. I first made my way to Silithus when no one was there, alone on my horse. I love the sense of discovery you get in WoW. When you're first playing, you turn a corner and there's a whole other place, with all new colors and hidden caves and things. The fact that the gates of Silithus open to another set of swirly instance doors makes me sad. I thought I'd be able to wander in, look around, meet another flight guy. It makes me wonder if the land beyond the dark portal will be the same: just another place I won't have time to see.
But, at least I can say I was there.
