Unbearably HoT

When I’m not fine-tuning my gear, farming or leveling a plethora of alts, I enjoy collecting non-combat pets. A waste of bank space, right? With at least six different gear sets on my druid, I couldn’t agree more, but somehow I’m attached to all the critters I’ve accumulated over the years.

Inventory woes, however, are going the way of the buffalo in Wrath of the Lich King. According to a blue post on the General Discussion forums:

Players will be able to “learn” a mount or non-combat pet much like learning a spell, recipe, or new ability, and these creatures will then show up on a new Pet tab within the Character Info section of the interface. Players will be able to access and preview their learned mounts and vanity pets through this tab.

I imagine this has a lot to do with the new “achievement” system; if certain achievements require you to collect a 50+ non-combat pets, where are you supposed to store them? Regardless, I’m not complaining, and I feel a lot less pressure to get rid of the not-quite-so-special animals in favor of the rarer drops.

If they’re all “summons” in a similar vein to the paladin and warlock mounts, I anticipate making a ridiculous /castsequence macro to bring up a random pet every time I hit the button.

Something fun like that anyway.

Before I start making any frenzied posts detailing why I worry about feral tanks in WotLK, let’s take a step back and address the now.

Just about any melee DPS class fully invested in damage will explain that +hit and expertise is invaluable—or at least important. Four thousand spell damage or eight million attack power can be rendered useless in a raiding environment unless you can actually connect with the mob you’re targeting. The same situation can apply to a PVP scenario as well: pesky cyclone or root resists can cost you an arena match. A simple armory search can pull up gear-listings for many high-end Restoration druids, and if you take a good look, many of them stack those lovely +10 spell-hit gems, along with Spell Penetration on their cloaks.

But +hit and expertise rating isn’t just for damage classes—the more you connect with the target(s) you’re tanking, the more TPS (threat-per-second) you’re generating. I might even add that it’s even more important for bears than our cat counterparts. I can sit around in front of Brutallus wearing every piece of my super don’t-die-gear, but I guarantee that I’ll miss maybe 2 out of every 3 mangles or have my Lacerates dodged or parried—you get the idea. If the specials with the highest threat multipliers aren’t landing, DPS will be perilously riding your ass.

Let’s clearly outline what we’re talking about here:

According to WoWWiki, “hit” can be defined as “the physical damage that occurs as a result of an attack made with a melee or ranged weapon. The chance to hit increases by 1% per 15.77 hit rating points at level 70.”

For druids (single-wielding, mind you), you need approximately 142 hit rating to increase your chance to hit a level 73 mob by 9%—this is your “hit cap”. When I reference a “cap”, it’s the generally accepted limit at which adding any more of a certain stat doesn’t actually help you. Exceeding 9% to hit won’t help counter dodges or parries (that’s expertise) or even misses; in my opinion, you’re actually better sitting just below the hit cap and chewing on some Spicy Talbuk Steak to bring you up to par rather than over-gearing or over-socketing (when you could be stacking more AGI or AP, etc.). Additionally, you can plan to take off a piece of gear with lots of hit on it and exchange it for a piece with more AGI if you know you’re going to have a Draenei in your party (passively increasing your chance to hit by 1%). While there never seem to be “absolutes” with Blizzard, a 9% chance to hit virtually guarantees zero misses against a target of level 73 or below.

Do you need 9% to hit for trash mobs? No. It rather goes without saying that you need less chance to hit when the level of the mob decreases and the gap between your weapon skill and its defense skill closes. Therefore, if you want to be a super dr00d (or rogue, or whatever), you can actually itemize two different DPS gear-sets: one hit-capped set (9%) for the boss, and one set (~5% for level 70s) that stacks more AGI for trash mobs.

What about expertise?

Expertise is a combat rating that decreases the chance your attack will be parried or dodged. Because druids don’t have any special racial talents (human sword/mace specialization, for example) or class talents (i.e. rogues) that increases expertise (this is changing in the expansion, however), we can calculate the amount of expertise needed to negate dodge as follows:

Boss mob’s base dodge = 6.5%
1% Expertise = 15.77 Expertise Rating
6.5 * 15.77 = 102.505

So realistically, you’d want approximately 103 Expertise Rating to completely negate a boss mob’s ability to dodge your attacks. If you’re melee DPS, you should theoretically be standing behind a target anyway, which theoretically eliminates parries.

Capping hit and expertise sounds like it makes a lot of sense, right? Connecting with your target generates more damage and more threat. The problem is getting there. It’s hard to bitch about getting hit capped when a dual wielder like a rogue needs twice as much as we do, but Blizzard doesn’t itemize hit and expertise for druids. Not specifically, anyway. If you look at the entire Thunderheart Harness, Sunwell items included, we net 50 hit rating (3.17% to hit) and 20 expertise rating. For the record, that’s pretty miserable, especially since 23 of that hit rating is on the belt, which is arguably inferior for tanking to the Belt of Natural Power, a T5 crafted item. Thus, if I’m wearing my “TPS” set for tanking (which is, by the way, beneath the armor cap), I have approximately 4.5% chance to hit and 4.62% dodge/parry reduction.

Lycentia, in his tanking gear picked up from similar raid instances, has approximately 6.34% to hit and can reduce the boss’s chance to dodge or parry an attack by 15.75%. We have to remember that Lycentia is a human wielding a sword and is also receiving the human sword specialization bonus, but that’s considerably more chances to connect with the boss and thus generate more threat per second. Even though druid threat is largely generated by high damage, if you’re not able to cause that damage, you might have a problem. Add Windfury to that equation, and now you’re looking at a chance to proc an additional attack that will, more than likely, connect as well. I’m a little jealous, and I’m looking forward to receiving the bonus from Windfury Totems (so long as I don’t have to give up Gift of Air).

My point is that druid tanking itemization is currently flawed, and that it should be a little bit easier to maximize your chance to hit and chance to reduce parry and dodge without sacrificing our bread and butter stats of AGI and STA. It’s that important. The more damage you, as a tank, put out, the more damage your raid can produce without worrying about pulling aggro. By not pulling your own weight, you’re threat capping your raid’s DPS and severely limiting the speed at which you can destroy a boss. If you can afford to wear a Shard of Contempt and a necklace such as the Brooch of Deftness, Pendant of Titans, Shattered Sun Pendant of Resolve, or Collar of the Pit Lord, I recommend it. To remain above your DEF cap, you can supplement your armor with the S3 chestpiece and socket with the AGI/HIT gems. This will likely drop you below the 35,880 armor cap, but if you set up a clever potion macro, you can join the ranks of warbots and slam down Ironshields with the best of them.

But those are (mostly) set pieces. As a cat, you’re probably wearing two pieces of T4 at least, and if you’re lucky, two pieces of T6 as well. Since most of the DPS gear we pick up is rogueish in nature, climbing to 142 hit rating isn’t too difficult at all. This is important because a successful cat DPS rotation relies on heavy crit for combo points and bleed debuffs; if one doesn’t “stick” or “hit”, you’re essentially blowing your whole cycle. A simplified DPS rotation (assuming high crit and ignoring powershifting for the moment) might go as follows:

1. Mangle
2. Shred
3. Shred
4. Shred
5. Rip

Because Mangle amplifies Shred damage and bleed effects, you will not want to Shred or Rip unless your Mangle debuff is up on your target. If you miss your Mangle or your Mangle is dodged, you’re a step behind in your rotation. If you miss it twice, you’re two steps behind and now you’re just wasting energy.

In Cat Form, I’m hit capped but not expertise capped. Some of this is based on the item slots I’ve chosen to use for my two piece T4 and T6 bonuses, but it’s also not quite as easy to get without sacrificing a lot of high-end stats. Often, I only run with the Shard of Contempt, which reduces a mob’s chance to dodge my attacks by 2.79%—not too stellar, but nearly 3% is much better than 0. If you’re not quite as worried about set bonuses or exchanging a high level item without expertise for a lower level item with, here are some easy expertise grabs:

Shard of Contempt (Heroic MgT): 44 expertise rating
Shapeshifter’s Signet (Lower City Reputation): 20 expertise rating
Grips of Deftness (Karazhan Trash): 15 expertise rating
Total: 5.00% dodge reduction

Slightly more difficult to obtain:

Shoulderpads of the Stranger (Hydross): 10 expertise rating
Belt of One Hundred Deaths (Lady Vashj): 25 expertise rating
Gloves of the Searing Grip (A’lar): 18 expertise rating
Total: 3.36% dodge reduction

Total with the best items combined: 7.41% dodge reduction, effectively negating a boss mob’s chance to dodge (6.5%) your attacks. You could even take a piece or two off.

Playing any hybrid class requires a veritable balancing act of trying to make the best of subpar itemization, but while you’re min/maxing for DPS and TPS, remember that you’re gimping yourself if you’re ignoring your hit and expertise ratings.

For a discussion about spell hit and spell damage for moonkin, visit Gray Matter.

It happens. Guilds are halfheartedly disbanding as raid numbers dwindle, leaving longtime home-realms to reroll elsewhere or igniting at that one, final flashpoint and exploding. Why? Maybe folks have seen what they want to see, and have moved on. Perhaps other games have lured people away. Maybe the gap between the BT/Hyjal release and the opening of the Sunwell may have tired early T6 farmers, that guilds farming BT/Hyjal may not have been prepared for Sunwell’s ramped up difficulty, that general summer ennui set in as vacations and finals rolled through, and that with Wrath of the Lich King looming on the horizon, many would rather just sit back and start preparing for the storm. I’m not the first to write about this, and I won’t be the last.


And I’ve had it. It takes a lot more than minor discontent to burn-out someone who’s been progression raiding for over two years. I waited a little while for the dust to settle, take care of some real life concerns and, you know, get my rogue to 60, but here, in list format, is why I quit Singularity and took a break from progression raiding.


Loss of Core Raiders and Attendance Issues
Over the past few months, we had (not entirely out of the ordinary) moments of great shame, and moments of great triumph. We freed Kalecgos, destroyed Brutallus, survived Felmyst and even managed to start in on some rather discouraging Twins attempts. Meanwhile, we were practically bleeding raiders. Geared, competent apps were growing fewer and farther between, and with a sudden explosion of real life issues (marriage, familial difficulties, school), we lost a solid portion of our officer core as well.


In my opinion, some of those folks were the people who really pulled everyone together and focused our efforts to the knife-point necessary to dissect encounters. They were incredibly vocal, critical people, and more importantly, they had the officer tag that allowed them to enforce what they said. The final loss of our raid leader and GM (who actually re-rolled to play with Juggernaut) nearly nailed the coffin-lid shut—on both the guild and my desire to raid. People can’t just be given the officer tag and be expected to lead—authority and trust are two essential qualities that have to be developed over time. Rapidly attempting to metamorphose raiders into new officers didn’t quite work as I had hoped, and my outlook on the situation grew progressively bleaker.


Attitude
I have always considered myself a valuable asset to any raid group: I’m punctual, I’m prepared, I’m a superior player with quick reflexes, and I add a certain, wildly inappropriate something to a raid group. Let’s call it “levity”. As any leader knows, there’s a time and a place for goofing off, and there’s a lot to be said for boosting morale. Generally speaking, I have a knack for doing and knowing just that. It’s not exactly a designated job, but when I’d returned to raiding after my week off, I got a surprising flurry of tells from folks asserting that things had been “boring” without me around. That’s cool. That’s my goal, so to speak.


Unfortunately, not everyone else has this same mentality. If there’s something to complain about, it’ll be complained about, and if they can show up late and play like a half-assed retard, they’ll do that as well. If they can get away with it. Certainly this doesn’t apply to everyone, and perhaps the people who did fall into that pattern had some kind of real life issue to work out. But when that sort of behavior largely goes unnoticed or unpunished in a situation where 24 other people are counting on you, it’s unacceptable. It generates resentment, both toward the leadership and toward your fellow players, spreading like a disease cloud of malcontent.


So when someone like me, who just a few months ago attempted to drive morale and progression with a massive consumable gathering expedition, suddenly finds herself bitter and frustrated and dreading logging on to a veritable shitstorm of ill-geared apps and people who seemingly don’t care anymore, what happens? It dragged on me. I got angry. I found fewer reasons to justify the mental exhaustion from raiding 10:00 p.m. to 1:30 a.m. on work nights. I unwittingly allowed my own irritation to bleed over in-game, and that, in my opinion, was also unacceptable and needed to change.


Raid Role
Many folks have periodically written about why tanks have such a high burn-out rate. While you can say the same thing about almost any class role, tanking isn’t easy. Let me rephrase that—effective tanking isn’t easy. There is a very high reliance on proper rotations, optimizing TPS output, utilizations of life-saving cooldowns, gear, quick-decision making, and…everyone else. I won’t digress into a tanking discussion here, but whether or not you have an official raid leading role, as the tank, you are often situated there. You lead, quite literally. You often pull. You manage mobs and their respective positions to the raid. You save all the people who mismanage aggro and the healers keeping you alive. And best of all, you’re in a prime position to screw up, repeatedly, and have everyone watch you do it.


That being said, other than watching your own damage output scale directly with TPS, doing everything correctly as a tank still doesn’t guarantee success. As Lycentia loves to say, “Tanking is watching everyone else fail around you.” While the amount of tanks necessary for any given encounter varies, most guilds have a much smaller pool of tanks than they do healers or DPS. Fewer tanks means stricter attendance and a heavier reliance on a small group of people: if a rogue can’t make it one night, you sub in more DPS. If one of your only FR tanks for Illidan can’t make it, you’re in trouble. A lot of time and effort goes into training and gearing tanks, and a lot of people take that for granted. It is, arguably, the most stressful non-officer position in a raid, and even considering leaving saddled me with some rather impressive guilt. A friend actually told me:

If you didn’t want to put up with everyone’s bullshit, you shouldn’t have rolled a tank. Leaving kind of bones everyone.

Relatively shocked, I responded with:

So by virtue of me playing a tank, I am thus held to some invisible higher standard than every other class? That I should continue to play even when I’m not having fun anymore just because I happen to be a tank?

Needless to say, the conversation ended there when both of us realized how dumb it sounded. But those expectations do exist, and I steadily grew tired of them.


Conclusion
That’s essentially the lion’s share of my reasoning for stepping back for awhile and focusing on general makeouts and high fives. I harbor no ill-will toward Singularity at all, especially since many of my friends still play there, and I have no intentions of transferring. Doomhammer is “it”, but it is currently my intention to prepare for competitive 10-man progression raiding in WotLK. With that in mind, myself and the other two tanks who left (along with a few friends) have created a new guild, with a new “charter”, so to speak, to move toward that goal.


I present to you:

DREAD LOBSTER


Recruiting will actually happen soon. Extensive class knowledge, tolerance for multisyllabic words and deliberately unreasonable requests a must. If this is something you’re seriously interested in, talk to me.

Focusing on progression is admittedly tiresome. As long as you keep farming, keep pushing and make measurable headway on new content, you can let yourself get sucked into the whole process without feeling too strained. Unfortunately, everyone stumbles. It’s been a long time since I felt considerably frustrated on any particular raid-boss and had to resign myself to the fact that this could take…awhile. Not since C’thun.


Sunwell can be particularly unforgiving about making mistakes. Screwing up a portal rotation or standing too close to someone else when one spawns can spell disaster. Losing any particular player on Brutallus might mean you’re too short on damage or healing and won’t make the enrage. Failing to Mass Dispel or run away from an Encapsulate victim during the Felmyst encounter…you get the idea. But they’re still easy in comparison to the challenge the Eredar Twins has presented.


Does it help we’re running with too much melee and too few healers? No, not at all. I even had the remarkably unpleasant experience of respeccing Resto the other night for a gangbang wipefest on the Twins. I haven’t been resto since before 2.4 and found things working…a little differently than I remembered. That, coupled with gear that was suddenly sub-par, woefully unenchanted and ungemmed, made for a teeth grindingly good time. And by good time, I mean I went to bed in a dour mood with a massive headache. Don’t get me wrong—I’m all for learning, but when we’re running with spur-of-the-moment healers and trying to make progress, it’s hard to expect much.


So we’re cockblocked, well and truly. While we at one point had eight million and twelve mages and warlocks, we now have too-few casters and flurry of assorted melee. The casters are being Shadow Furied into oblivion, piss-poor reaction times to the Conflagration debuff wipe us in seconds and no one seems to be watching their threat at all. To be perfectly honest, I don’t think anyone’s paying attention. I’m sick of everyone discussing the fucking hockey playoffs when everyone is trying to focus, and thus I’m going to pretend that they’re not trying hard enough rather than assume everyone is mentally retarded.


The best I can do is fine-tune my own approach and attitude, and hope that sets some sort of example. HAHAHAHAHA. But right now, it seems like Conflagration is reliably targeting whoever is third on aggro, so we’re hotfixing our approach by using three tanks on Sacrolash as an attempt to control the burn (so to speak). I anticipate better attempts tonight. Since I’m not tanking as of yet on that encounter and (let’s be honest) a rogue or fury warrior better fills my DPS role, I’ll probably be sitting for awhile or going back to healing until we can muscle our way though the tough spots. The catch? I’ll probably be healing on my badge-pimped paladin, Dorkasaurus.


Thus, in the near future, I might be scooping up T6 epics that’d otherwise be sharded for the millionth time in BT and Hyjal and switching back and forth between the healer and tank perspective. In the meantime, I’m busily rearranging and resocketing my various sets of tank gear for maximum soak, dodge and threat generation (fashion show coming soon to a theater near you) and starting to rework my UI for a more efficient healing set up (because healing with Perfect Raid was a nightmare), and any and all suggestions are welcome—I’m even thinking of trying out the Grid/Clique combo.


That’s all I’ve got right now—I’m preoccupied by those Eredar ho’s and our current inability to coordinate well enough to kill them. And remember:

Don’t forget to check out the 5-7-5 Haiku Contest!

In the months precursory to The Burning Crusade expansion, the desire and drive to push progression crawled to a standstill for many guilds. Why keep raiding when our high level epics will be replaced with greens in the next three months? Why keep our noses to the grindstone when really, we could just coast until the expansion comes out? Are we seriously going to have to cut our 40 man raids in half? The list goes on. Disheartened by the prospect of starting over rather than amping themselves up for incoming new content, many raiders just quit the game entirely.


Many people probably heard the announcement that Wrath of the Lich King alpha testing was released to friends and family of Blizzard staff very recently—and if Blizzard’s track record is any indication (five months from alpha to release), that might mean we’ll see a hastily assembled expansion by September or October. The face of raiding changed dramatically from the original release to the expansion, and predictably, is set to change again. According to this blue post, one of WotLK’s major selling points is that all content, I repeat all raid dungeons, will be available in a handy ten-man sized serving. Shit, son!


Before everyone decries this as the total casual catering, regardless of how tightly tuned the encounters might be, think about it: you could take ten of your best raid buddies, the guys you trust, the chicks you know kick ass regularly, and destroy all content without any of the loldrama that tends to accompany the 25-man progression guilds we have now. If you have a small, tight knit group of raiders who even have similarly well-geared and well-played alts, then what’s stopping you from creating a ridiculously well-oiled class rotating raiding machine? This move by Blizzard represents the ULTIMATE in casual candy-coated raiding for the Everyone, but is also, in my opinion, one of the most alluring. Will the 25 mans still have better loot? I hope so. But would you be willing to settle for sloppy seconds if you didn’t have to bust your ass 17 hours a week with maybe 8 people you really like and 17 others you only tolerate? Maybe “sloppy seconds” was poor phraseology.


As the old cliché goes, history frequently repeats itself. To say that I haven’t seen this coming would be a bold-faced lie, but let’s just say I’ve been delaying writing about the inevitable—this is going to destroy the guilds who are already licking the knife’s edge of implosion. Death and Taxes, a veritable staple in World and US firsts since before Burning Crusade, officially disbanded on May 16th and cited this as one of the reasons:

“The ship went down faster than the Titanic, but the rats were bailing before the iceberg was ever in sight.”

Destruction imminent. While their mainpage goes on to cite a laundry-list of concerns and excuses et cetera, I hear the same amgcasualcraft mutterings that Risen expounded upon at length and the general consensus that, while Sunwell is finally the fine-tuned dungeon we’ve all been looking for, it’s too little too late. My raider radar didn’t really start beeping until I continued on toward the end:

“Somewhere along the line, people got the idea that they were bigger than the guild.”

Why is that? Some intrinsic human decency and vague sense of honor and obligation seems to have evaporated once forty-mans went the way of the buffalo. Were progression guilds still full of douchebags, elitists and general troublemakers back then? Oh, absolutely—but something kept us together. Drama existed but generally remained muted. Guild relations were often terse but not usually downright hostile. Any player who pulled some spectacular bullshit could find him or herself perma-blacklisted by top end guilds on their realm. Overall, I contend that there existed a greater loyalty toward the guild rather than toward the player, as we see now. I attribute this phenomenon to:

1. Slower gear up: fully gearing a 40 man raid took a ridiculous amount of time when bosses dropped fewer tokens than we see today in 25 mans. Acquiring T2 or T3 gear required a fairly substantial time commitment and a large amount of patience. As a newcomer to Awen, I had to compete with other druids (nevermind other casters or rogues or intrepid leather-wearing DPS warriors) who had hundreds upon hundreds more DKP than me—and still hadn’t gotten the items they wanted. The more time you spend with a group usually tends to imply that you get to know your fellow raiders more and, I’d argue, creates a sort of implicit, binding contract: you help me get my gear and I’ll help you get yours.
2. The “real” reputation grind: in my experiences, it was largely difficult to get into a decent guild on any particular realm unless you had some sort of in-guild sponsor or were realm-famous for…something else. Old World PVP, maybe. Raiders, or rather—prospective raiders, oftentimes found it necessary to cultivate realm-wide relationships without stepping on too many toes if they wanted to have a chance to break in to a specific raiding community. I was lucky enough to have a few sponsors in Awen that pushed my application forward—other top guilds, such as Lunaris, were notoriously “tight knit” and exceptionally difficult to break into.
3. Inaccessible server transfers: I lay a lot of the blame for guild breakdown on the ridiculously easy ability to server transfer these days. With six months in between allowed transfers, you had to be really fucking sure you wanted to leave, and super certain that you had a place to go to on your target realm. That, combined with the notion that you’d have to “rep grind” all over again, as listed in #2, was a huge deterrent to picking up and leaving. While I’ve server transferred a total of three times in two years, once was with my entire guild, for free, once was when my guild broke up and there wasn’t anything left on Baelgun, and the final time was to my permanent resting place on Doomhammer. It’s so easy to leave now that players aren’t required to commit to a guild for longer than three months—you can, essentially, with the ease of gear acquirement in TBC, loot phat purplez and leave for better grounds.
4. Name changes: similar to the easy server transfers, it’s more and more difficult to track someone’s progress across multiple realms now. Get all the gear you want out of people and then don’t want to stick around to work on a boss? Change your name and leave! Sell your toon! Become a new person all over again! Reinvent yourself into someone even more unoriginal and lame! While this feature has undoubtedly created some hilarious name changes (Dongwaffle comes to mind), I find that it caters to a player’s vanity more than anything else. Vanity—now we’re getting back to players feeling that they’re bigger than their guild.

As has been mentioned by a million people already, the 25 man raiding environment means (by numbers alone) that each person is almost twice as important, is counted on in a greater fashion, than each individual person was in a 40 man raiding environment. Egos have soared. The loss of 3 key individuals, depending on class, can cripple a guild until it finds replacements. There are folks who use that to their advantage and essentially blackmail the guild until they get what they want. They don’t care what they say or who they say it to, because they feel invulnerable. Me—I still standby my old guildmaster’s adage: “Everyone is expendable. You can and you will be replaced if I see fit.”


That’s how it should be. But even now, I’m feeling the heat. As the only feral druid with a ridiculous gear set who just happens to be coupled with the protection tank with the best gear, there’s a heavy reliance for both of us to always be on and always be available to spearhead raids. We have other warriors with only slightly inferior gear, and, even now, a protection paladin, but our combined experience and gear (along with my sass and ability to mediate when I feel like it) makes us a valued asset. It’s pressure. It’s hard not to feel like we should get some sort of special treatment. I am compelled by my old world loyalties and deep-rooted obligations to continue raiding in the best capacity I can despite the fact that I have, lately, felt unappreciated and generally disrespected. People have passed gear to me so that I can function as the best tank I can, and it’s important, in my mind, to set an example by not taking their “sacrifice” for granted. I don’t want to be “that person”.


So what have I been doing the past raid week, then? Sleeping. Watching movies. Playing Titan Quest: Immortal Throne and laying out a series of articles. Pointedly not playing WoW. After making sure that Kalecgos and Brutallus were appropriately handled, Lycentia and I found it in our best interests to take a four day break from raiding and reevaluate our roles in raiding. With people regularly ripping out each other’s throats, our minds growing progressively worn and patience thin, and with the siren’s call of 10-man raids nibbling at our ears, the question arose—do we keep doing this? Do we put up with the bullshit and keep pushing toward Kil’jaedan?


The quick answer is yes.


I implore all of you, however, to take a moment and subject yourself to the some serious thinking about your raid style, and bring these kinds of questions up in your guild as well:

Am I having fun?
Is this interfering with my day to day life and/or out of game ambitions?
Am I losing sleep over the game?
Is my generated effort being matched by the rest of the guild?
Am I being treated with respect and, similarly, treating others the same way?
Am I setting an example or contributing to a problem?

All instances reset today. Sunwell Plateau beckons us once more with the prospect of continuous wiping and brief moments of in-game glory. I am endeavoring to change mindsets this week, exact change and put my best paws forward—for now.

It’s recently come to my attention that someone was trying to claim my druid as their own—and in a piss-poorly written application post, no less.

Thus, if you ever see or hear of anyone using “Runyarusco” as a reference or claimed as an “alt”, they’re totally full of shit. Why? Because I’m the only Runyarusco in the Armory. I’m also the only “70 resto name Runyarusco in the guild <Singularity>”.

Link to the Application Itself.

Please let me know if you hear of anything else like this. Thanks!