Tank like a girl

Yesterday, I had a pretty bad day WoW-wise. Rarely ever have I felt so defeated about this game that so many of us play. Through it all, I have come to a couple observations about me and WoW 3.0. Prepare for a lot of QQ, and rest assured that I will go back to informative or entertaining posts soon. But this is boiling inside of me, it’s my blog, it’s got to come out.

1. I love tanking. Above all. Kadomi will always be my first love. Everything else might be fun, but Kadomi is my main. Not getting to play her in raids is breaking my heart and sapping my will to push my guild to raid.

2. I think the easy approach to raiding is totally backfiring, especially for casual guilds like mine. In TBC when we first started doing 10-man raids, none of us had been in Karazhan, other than maybe one or two people. It was this big thing that we did together. Same with Zul’Aman. I still remember the overwhelming feeling of triumph when we first got down Hex-Lord Malacrass together. I loved it. But that’s not how raiding is panning out in WotLK. Right now, we have people who are struggling to get geared but are finally getting there, and then we have people who PUG raids. Stuff like Naxx and OS, but even Eye of Eternity. When we will now finally start Naxx this weekend, it will be with people in the raid who approach raids as something that you PUG for loot, as if they were just bigger versions of heroics, not something that you want to conquer with 9 friends. I am casual for a reason, with a hardcore mentality to raiding, but above all, I just want to encounter new challenges and see content, together with friends. I have spoken to friends from other casual guilds that raid (as opposed to casual raiding guilds), and they have similar feelings. It’s very disheartening.

3. Along with the PUG issue comes another issue I never ever thought I’d see happen to us: people signing up for our raids and then getting locked to another raid’s ID. Isn’t that just great? Screw tanking, Kadomi, your best-geared healer just had to got asked to do the 8-man Naxx achievement with another guild, forgetting about our very own raid, so prepare yourself to be healbot again. Now I am stuck with having to make a raid work somehow, by bowing out of the tanking spot I so badly crave. I am no longer a main tank, I am now a raid healer, not of my own choosing completely.

Edit: Some of that paragraph was written in massive anger and did not reflect entirely how things went down. Valuable lesson learnt, don’t blog when you’re really angry.

4. Three years on a US server, 9 hours ahead of my own timezone are finally getting to me. I am tired of late late hours when I want to run anything. Would most of you guys stay up til 4 am to run a heroic? I think not. I am tired of twiddling my thumbs when I get home from work because the server is deserted. The siren song of my German friends trying to lure me back to picking up my characters on Forscherliga is getting more attractive. But I would miss Kadomi. So many hours, days, weeks, months of my life invested into her. I would miss my Bronzebeard friends. I tried the EU approach before and loved playing in my timezone, but I missed playing Kadomi so much, and my German guild tried to turn me into a four nights a week T5 raider, which was too much for me, so I quit.