2fps

C’thun and Yogg-Saron are very very connected in lore and in my own experiences so I’m compelled to lump them into one post together. First, C’thun.

I encountered C’thun late in the game while decked out in T5/T6 gear. I was asked to tank for the zone but was upstaged by a much louder, stupider tank who considered himself to be God’s gift to WoW. Instead of putting him in his place I opted to go the mature path: brooding in the back like Achilles in his tent. On the Twin Emps I simply watched from the sidelines. But then we reached what looked to me like a very non-descript hallway and the raid came to a halt. The blustery tank who had run full-tilt through the instance now reached a point that gave him pause. He had no idea what the C’thun fight was like at all and suddenly realized he was too good to be leading us scrubs anyway and from that point he took a back seat.

With prodding from Salanthe, I started directing things, outlining the general strategy. Salanthe was good enough to organize the groups in a better configuration, a talent I have yet to acquire even still, and we peeked ’round the corner. You’re introduced to C’thun through a tiny crack in the wall and if you aren’t careful you can very easily be the cause of your raid wiping before you even enter the room.

Step too close to that eyeball and you’ll provoke C’thun into nuking you with a laser beam that then chains to everyone standing near you gaining strength as it goes from person to person.

Coming upon that giant eyeball so unexpectedly made me jump a little. I felt a little hypnotized immediately. Carefully, we hugged the walls and got into position. The C’thun fight involves tentacles sprouting from the floor that need to be killed and so so so many laser beams of death that still proved lethal even at level 70. At times, a small group of people are required to enter C’thun’s belly and destroy two tentacles inside the stomach. While you’re in the stomach you take a stacking amount of damage until you die or escape via Old God-vomit. We counted on it being a breeze but were dismayed to learn that C’thun was bugged in that particular patch so that the damage you took inside the stomach scaled based on your characters spellpower. This meant we were taking insane amounts of damage and couldn’t simply steamroll this nasty boss.

At one point I emerged nearly dead from the stomach and was assaulted by a tentacle I hadn’t noticed nearby. I hung around 100hp for what seemed like forever but was actually only a couple of seconds before running away smack into a laser beam of death. I watched from the floor as about 25 remaining raid members finished the job. I attribute the bulk of the raid’s success to the healing prowess of one resto shammy cow.

And then there was Yogg.

Downing Vezax and stepping into the shattered prison room of another Old God had me confused. There was no monstrous eye, no tentacles, no… anything except for one friendly looking woman standing in the center of the room. After we engaged her and started getting the hang of blowing up faceless ones on top of her while avoiding the gas clouds of horrible death I grew to hate Sara and her loud tauntings and confusing allegia–OMG FUUUUUUUUUU–

As Sara suffered the last of our explosions the entirety of the floor erupted underneath us and the enormous mass of Yogg-Saron’s thousand maws came rushing upwards. Giant crusher tentacles, laser beams, floods of diseases, poisons and curses… this was more like it. We had many crazy attempts that ultimately frayed and fizzled in the chaos of the encounter until one night on what was to be one of our last attempts. One person died, then another. I had directed dps onto Yogg himself for a minute because we appeared to be handling the adds well enough to let them pile up a bit. Then there were five then six then seven giant faceless ones pounding on the tanks and more people were dying. I snuffed it seconds later and turned my camera around just in time to see Yogg explode in death. The same surprise and awe I experienced when we first saw Yogg’s true form was the same feeling (and then some) that I felt seeing him die courtesy of some damn fine dps folk.

When I got asked to heal for Talisman on their first Kara trek I showed up with my Continuum Blade and my Spaulders of the Righteous, fully gemmed with stamina and spellpower. Properly garbed in fail, I was introduced to Nightbane, scourge of Karazhan.

I didn’t have a clue what was going on; mostly I was just desperately trying to learn how to play as Holy for the first time while trying to follow everyone else in the raid so I didn’t get lost. And then there was a moment where we were just hanging out on a seemingly uninhabited castle rampart doing nothing. I was standing alongside the other healers like I was supposed to and so just waited for instructions.

Then there was the sound of a great rushing wind and a colossal skeletal dragon descended right on top of our tank. The beating of its wings, the roar as it attacked and the scrape of bone and steel were the only things I heard as I stared in amazement.

What is it that a tank sees most during a raid? Well that depends. If the boss is a dragon or other non-humanoid then the tank sees nothing but giant toes the entire fight. If its a humanoid, you get a crotch closeup. So despite how much I love tanking I’m glad I’ve been able to fill other roles as well if only for the fact that I get to actually see the fights from a different, more panoramic perspective.

Fighting Nightbane looks kinda like this from a distance:

When you’re tanking you don’t see anything like that. Below, I’ve made a quick illustration of what you see while fighting Nightbane as a tank:

Toes, toes, toes and nothing but toes.

In any case, we struggled against Nightbane for a little while that night but ultimately defeated it and moved on to clear out the rest of Karazhan. There are other impressive bosses in that zone but even the Prince wasn’t as dramatic as seeing Nightbane descend for the first time.

Remember the Power Rangers? No, the original ones. The show was on in the mornings before school when I was growing up and my brother and I watched it unfailingly. The annoying thing about this was we always had to leave to catch the bus ten minutes before the show ended. Thus, every episode we saw the Power Rangers fighting random goons in hand to hand combat and then the nasty bad guy monster would get supersized and… that would be it. We left without seeing the Rangers summon their giant robot vehicles and we had only the vague descriptions of our friends for what the Megazord might look like.

One day we were late getting up and so we had to be driven to school a little bit later by a parent. This meant that we’d finally finish an episode. I unfortunately was pulled away to finish getting ready for school so only my brother got to see it. After the episode ended he came rushing upstairs yelling, “THEY COME UP OUT OF THE GROUND, THEY COME UP OUT OF THE GROUND.”

It’s these kinds of moments that keep you engaged in something; the sense of awe at the moment of discovering something, whether it be a profound discovery or a completely silly one.

Those of you wanderers of Azeroth reading can probably cite several such experiences. Typically these moments are frequent when you’re just venturing out into the foreign frontier of the Barrens, bright-eyed and innocent but become few and far between after you’ve played for a long while and have become enthralled to some pompous jackass across the country who yells at you about your performance on a quasi-nightly basis (the innuendo and lewd jokes write themselves from here).

The first time I saw a wandering elite mob was one such moment of awe. It was Knucklerot and Luzran from the Ghostlands, the two giant abominations who roam the Dead Scar. These guys were a very real and present threat above anything else you previously encounter in WoW.

Raid bosses are basically the same way but (potentially) the impression they give is magnified a thousand times over. It’s one thing to spot a Son of Arugal in the darkened forest and quite another thing to sneak into Onyxia’s lair.

And that’s what I wanted to talk about. Over the next few days I’ll be posting individual posts to talk about the four raid bosses that have been the most awe-inspiring for me personally. I’ll give you a hint as to who will be appearing first in this list:

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaah! Charred Earth, move move move!

This is Paris.

If you grew up here you might call it home. You might recall fondly the house in which you spent your childhood. You may smirk as you remember the hole in the wall restaurant that the tourists never knew about and so, never ruined.

If you didn’t grow up here you may still think that Paris is a magical city of light and love. The city’s name may conjure up images of ultra chic bohemian artists in black berets lounging in front of a café smoking fancy cigarettes.

Paris is a lot of things to a lot of people but what is it really? Basically, like most other cities, its an organized pile of rock, metal, stone, concrete and other building materials heaped up on a bit of dirt. Obviously, such a literal definition completely misses the point.

Paris is what it is because of what we’ve invested in it. We’ve assigned it any number of endless varieties of meanings, sub-meanings, definitions, to construct a symbolic concept of the place. The things we give to Paris in terms of symbols and meanings matter more than the type of wood used in the buildings or the color of the metal in the Eiffel Tower. Paris is what it is largely due to the history of symbolic offerings people have granted it over time.

Four paragraphs of stuff we already know all about, yes yes get on with it and make your point if you have one seriously omg.

Sometimes I think my inner critic sounds like a valley girl. I don’t know what to do about that.

Anyway, I bring this up because my feed reader is full to the brim with chatter about Cataclysm and how to weather out these Last Days of Wrath and thus I naturally think back to when the chatter was about Wrath and how to weather out the Last Days of Burning Crusade and then I think about before WoW when I was the Hierophant of the Hartstone druids in the Serenwilde Forest and back before that to when I was a restless, naive, womanizing young priest of Shallam.

Right there at the end of that train of thought is when I realize I’m feeling homesick for places that I’ve never been and in fact have never even existed.

What do you do when the symbols and meanings and attachments and investments that you ordinarily give to the places in the world around you are instead given to virtual places that you can only experience through the looking-glass of the computer? How do you properly deal with the longing to return to a virtual home?

This is a bit different when dealing with closed media. I fell in love with Tolkien’s Beleriand when I was young and I was absolutely shocked numb when Gondolin was overrun by Morgoth’s armies. I briefly felt that I didn’t know what I would do in a world where the sanctuary of Ondolindë no longer existed (ain’t no reference nerdier than a reference to Exilic Quenya). However, I finished The Silmarillion in a matter of days and the impact of Gondolin’s fall didn’t last much longer than the afternoon I read about it (actually that’s kind of a lie, I still feel the tragedy deep down. Damn you Maeglin!).

With MUD’s and MMO’s and online worlds generally, you can spend a lot longer than a few days living in a dream. Most importantly, there are other people in this world which keeps you interested and engaged long after you might have put aside the Ocarina of Time. And if you happen to like the people you meet in these worlds there’s very often precious little you can do to interact with them unless you’re logged in, planted in front of that machine.

So, if you’re like me, you give in to these worlds completely. Maybe because you’ve moved to a relatively isolated smaller town and you don’t know anyone and you don’t have transportation to get around town so you can meet anyone and then you discover this weird online community set within a fictional world and you decide to immerse yourself in said world entirely for the space of something like… years.

Maybe that’s how it happens. I certainly wouldn’t know or anything. Ahem.

The problem with investing so heavily in these worlds is that rather than being made of stone and soil, they’re games built of computer code made by a company in order to make a profit first and foremost. That makes them extraordinarily volatile, changeable and ultimately, supremely fragile places to call home. I can still drive by the apartment complex where I spent the first eight years of my life and yes its changed quite a bit but the changes have been wholly organic, natural. There is cause and effect and reasons for all the changes and they make sense and I still recognize it as a place that used to be my home.

Compare that to the world of Achaea where I’ve logged an obscene amount of play time. The history of the Church in Achaea evolved much like my childhood home did for a while. There was an evolving narrative with cause, effect, and understandable player-driven reasons for most changes. Sure, newbies no longer had to wait around online for a Church leader to grant them membership because the game eventually gave tools to automate that kind of thing to meet the needs of a growing playerbase but that kind of change can be expected. Then Iron Realms, the company that runs Achaea, decided to make vast sweeping changes to how characters gained access to their class-specific skills and abilities. These changes were so jarring and so sudden and so unnatural that I lost my connection to the virtual world. Suddenly my suspension of disbelief was shattered and it no longer felt like home.

When the reality of Achaea the Game eclipsed the concept of Achaea the World, a part of who I had defined myself as ceased to exist. I was Angaril Del-Amroth. I had close friends who called me Annie. I was married to an amazing priestess named Sequona. We had wedding rings we designed ourselves. Then the record scratched and it all went away. The game that I played doesn’t exist anymore; it was fundamentally altered by “outside” forces. If my childhood home burned to the ground I could at least go to the scorched bit of ground where it used to stand. There isn’t any equivalent for that for virtual worlds.

To cite a more relevant example for the bulk of you reading, allow me to indulge in more Burning Crusade nostalgia. When my first toon was only in the mid-40′s my family moved to a new house. We didn’t have internet access for the first two weeks or so after moving so in order to feed my new craving for Azeroth I went to a game shop that had computers you could rent by the hour for playing WoW. One time I was in there plunking away at some awful quest in Stranglethorn and I happened to glance behind me. There were some high school kids playing too and I caught a glimpse of one of them skimming the treetops of Terokkar Forest. My first glimpse of Outland and I was floored by how amazing it was.

In the last months of BC before Wrath came out I could fly around Outland on my own Netherwing mount and point out where significant events had occurred during my time playing.

That’s where my brother rogue-tanked Durn after seeing videos of other rogues tanking Illidan and Mother Shahraz by stacking agility to the point where the bosses couldn’t land a hit.

That’s where my brother and I kept getting ganked while we were waiting for arena queues to pop.

That’s the ledge of the Aldor bank where Salanthe and I used to sit and talk after every raid.

That’s where I waited with butterflies in my stomach before going into Gruul’s Lair for my first 25-man raid.

That’s the place wherein I spent so much time I considered changing my mailing address to Ravhinn Lark c/o Medivh, 1 Karazhan Court.

When the 3.0 patch came out and introduced the new talent trees and mechanics before Wrath officially launched, my brother experienced a similar disconnect to the one I felt with Achaea. In fact, that night he had gone on a Kara run to test out the new rogue skills and halfway through the raid he swore loudly, threw his keyboard and turned off his computer in a rage because it all felt so foreign and he didn’t know how to play anymore.

The Burning Crusade doesn’t exist anymore. At least, it doesn’t exist as the virtual world in which I once lived. Burning Crusade the Game certainly still exists in a greatly altered version though.

These massive, abrupt changes to the games I’ve played have all been cataclysmic and they’ve done an impressive disappearing act with the worlds I once knew. So I don’t really know what to do when I’m sitting outside my condo at night talking to the neighbor’s cat, enjoying the warm evening air and I’m suddenly reminded of the night I spent in the Basilican Gardens chasing butterflies with a girl to whom I’d later propose and I furrow my brow as I realize it wasn’t ever a tangible reality. Or when I drive away from my brother’s new house recalling the time we flew out to Nagrand to farm Primal Shadows and I can’t decide how much of that experience I’d call “real”.

I don’t have a satisfying answer to any of these questions.









P.S. – The title for this post is a variation of an inside joke about something I said once while in the throes of a tantrum that came out wrong and ended up sounding like the worst middle-school-angst-ridden line from a botched love poem. I DON’T ACTUALLY MEAN THE EMOTIONS IMPLIED BY THE TITLE GUYS. I’M SAYING IT SARCASTICALLY SO YOU STILL LIKE ME RIGHT? RIGHT INTERNET FRIENDS?!

Lindsay, by you reaching the level of attending physician, you have somehow managed to become a member of a club that I belong to. Obviously there was no vote. Because if there had been, you would still hear the sound of my voice screaming: “nay, nay, oh, dear God, one thousand times nay!”. That being said, it’s my obligation to let you in on the organization’s one and only by-law: We’re men. The women are men. The children are men. The men, of course, men! So, I went ahead and took the liberty of making you five “Man Cards”. Hold them very dear, because every time you drop the ball, man-wise, I’m going to take one from you.

The above is a quote from the TV show Scrubs as said by the foul-tempered alpha male Doctor Cox to his fellow attending Dr. Dorian. For the sake of being complete, you can find this quote in context in the first episode of the show’s fifth season.

Pewter over at ‘Mental Shaman recently asked for people to discuss their thoughts about how men specifically are affected, or how they relate to, issues of sex, gender and power in the context of WoW. This stems from discussions about women and feminism in WoW terms and the question of “What about the men?” that has come up as a result.

(Its a little funny to note how much, or rather how little, time it took for this most recent surge in posts talking about feminism/gender issues to shift towards a discussion of those same subjects as they relate to males specifically.)

The kyriarchy

So let’s start with an overhead view to tie things back in to the quote at the top of the post. Societies are typically stratified along lines of gender, race, etc. Patriarchy specifically has been the norm almost universally throughout history. This is absolutely still true today in life generally and in Azeroth. So what we can see is that our WoW community is generally set up in two layers with men being the dominant group in the society and women the minority (please note that minority as used here doesn’t refer to a numerical relationship but rather suggests a group in a society that has less power than the dominant group).

Fairly simple and easy to see supporting evidence right? Men dominate leadership positions, specific roles seen as prestigious, e.g. Main Tank, etc. Women are more commonly found in supportive roles, often devalued by the community generally in various ways and so on and so on.

That makes for an ok starting point in these kinds of discussions but it isn’t a very nuanced or complex perspective. As Pewter mentions, we’re dealing more with a kyriarchy rather than a strict patriarchy. That is to say, we ought to look at a number of factors, not just gender. We’re now talking about “shifting circles of privilege, power, and domination” which take into account all kinds of other factors besides gender.

Our society then becomes a little more complex. Instead of having a situation where men are the dominant group over women we can see other statuses used to stratify society. Do all men relate to women the same? Do all men relate to men the same? Is the dominant group internally stratified or are all men on the same playing field?

All of which is my characteristic “tl;dr” way of setting up the question “What does it mean to be a man in WoW?” I was going to cite a number of different examples but in the interest of brevity I’ll just use one: Blood Elf men.

The Blood Elf male

Throughout vanilla WoW, the Horde was composed of the stereotypically “ugly” races: super-muscular orcs, hulking tauren, sinister undead and savage trolls. The Horde was also seen as being superior to the Alliance in PvP. Player reactions to the addition of the Blood Elf race in BC are particularly helpful in showing how males are stratified in game.

When beta testers began creating male Blood Elf characters there was enormous dissatisfaction with the way the model looked. Blood Elf males were slender and lithe and the community by and large did not approve. The model was described as being “too gay”, “girly” and a lot of other inappropriate, things. Blizzard responded quickly by beefing up the model’s muscles and giving this explanation:

As many players have noticed, we have made a slight change to the male Blood Elf character models. In response to concerns that the Blood Elf male appeared to be too feminine, and after reviewing the model from a visual and conceptual standpoint, the decision was made to increase the body mass to give them a more substantial, masculine feel. It was also important that as members of the Horde that the Blood Elves gave the impression of strength and a more menacing presence.

That model must have looked pretty bad to get such negative attention and such a swift correction from Blizzard right? Judge for yourself. Here’s a side-by-side comparison of the models as seen in profile.

The standard used to judge masculinity in WoW then and now is “How many biceps do your biceps have? Do your deltoids have a six-pack? Do you (or can you) have a scraggly, unkempt beard or does your facial hair know the womanly touch of scissors? Can you fit through a doorway without shattering its sides with your ox-like shoulders or does the door ask if you’ve gone through yet after you’ve passed by?”

The more males deviate from that standard (which of course I’ve exaggerated for effect), the more they’re viewed with contempt. In society generally, its acceptable for women to adopt behavior, styles, etc. from men but it is absolutely not acceptable for men to adopt the same from women. Women can wear pants, no problem. A man puts on a dress, big problem. Seeing how the original Blood Elf male model failed to conform to the standard sufficiently suggests just where the bar for acceptable masculinity in Azeroth is set.

There’s no question that men have more power than women in society generally (Of course there are individual exceptions, let’s avoid offering scraps of anecdotal evidence to the contrary as a way of “proving” something shall we?) but within the male social group (as in pretty much all other social groups) there are also varying levels of power and prestige and the group is always looking for reasons to take your “man cards” away.

Feminism and the plight of women in Azeroth seems to be the hot issue going around of late. Naturally I have plenty to say about the subjects; I always have plenty to say about most everything. I’m not going to get on a soapbox this time however. Instead, you get a needlessly lengthy history of my WoW career.

What does that have to do with anything? A lot of the stories people tell about their WoW experiences, particularly those centering around endgame raiding, are pretty similar. You typically hear about guilds run by men, raids populated by men, bosses defeated by men, etc. Women are often marginal and rare figures in many of these narratives because everyone knows only a minute number of females play WoW and they all play supporting roles right?

My story is different. My story includes a significant number of women occupying a range of roles and I’m grateful to have been playing in that kind of environment. I didn’t play the game with stereotypes, I played the game with people and now I’d like to share a story that isn’t simply another anecdote dominated by males. Its a story where men and women both have been leaders and followers, heroes and villains.

* * *

I was playing my first character Ravhinn ’round about patch 2.2 – 2.3 in the Burning Crusade. I was creeping closer to endgame so I started shopping around for a guild. I got wind of one that I thought matched up with what I was looking for and I started stalking some of its members to get a better feel for the group. The first person I actually talked to about joining was a level 68 resto shaman cow named Salanthe. Thus began one of my longest-standing friendships formed in Azeroth.

Salanthe and I duo’ed up as a tank/healer combo. In the beginning it was more of a wet tissue/healer combo. I grew to appreciate just how talented and amazing Salanthe was as I witnessed her skillful healing save many, many, many trips to the Black Morass from going awry. A number of reasons kept me from joining up with that guild in the end but it was only the first beginning of a long career spent side by side playing with and learning from Salanthe.

I ended up joining a newly-formed guild who hadn’t even cleared Karazhan yet. Not because they had tried and failed but because they were so new they hadn’t ever zoned into the place. I was whispered randomly by Priska, one of a handful of females in this guild and an officer-type, asking if I’d come heal for them. I hadn’t ever done that before. I was a tank dammit. Pragmatism took over however as I realized tanking gigs were hard to come by and I thought it might be an interesting change of pace to take the back seat and toss out some heals anyway.

I joined up with this new little guild named Talisman and we cleared the entirety of the zone in one night. This was unheard of at the time on our server. We were officially one of Moon Guard’s rising stars.

Talisman was technically led by two men and one woman. The official guild leader was a resto druid who took a back seat decision-wise during raids. He was such a non-influence in the beginning that I didn’t realize he was the GM until I’d been in the guild for months. Essentially the guild and its raids were led by Ralgore the tanking warrior and Ysabeau the healing priest. Their relationship was a scary combo of efficiency, pragmatism, insight and clarity (at least it seemed so to me in those days). Some of the best times I’ve had in WoW came from these early days of Talisman.

Ysabeau was, and is still, a woman I respect a good deal. She was Talisman’s mother, a living morale booster, and she was a career guildleader having come from Everquest where she’d been a guild leader for a long time before she stepped foot into Azeroth. One of the things I liked most about her was how she had her vision of how things in the guild should be and not only stuck to it but kept the rest of the guild working towards that vision as well.

Talisman is also where I met Mayfair who I’ve written about before.

Ultimately, I had a significant falling-out with the official guild leader who was treating me quite unfairly quite intentionally. After an extremely heated fight late in the night when no one else was around to see I decided I’d talk to Ysa and Priska about what had happened and if I didn’t get an apology from the guildmaster soon I was leaving. They made the decision to close ranks and I ended up leaving.

One of the few people that didn’t blacklist me after leaving Talisman was Aurorai the bear tank. Aurorai even invited my noob warlock to a Talisman alt run of Karazhan though the guild leadership stomped on that idea pretty quick which led to the run collapsing during the Maiden fight. Even after that drama, she still didn’t write me off and I’ve always been grateful to Auro for that.

My brother joined the guild a little before this and he stayed on with them for a long while. This was how months later I heard Ysabeau screaming at the top of her lungs over Ventrilo from down my hall. I went over to my brother’s room to investigate and found that Talisman was having a guild meeting in Ventrilo to talk about the guildmaster’s unacceptable behavior and attitude. Turns out I was right about the bastard all along (what a surprise!) and he was now being a complete asshat to everyone else in the guild. Ysabeau wasn’t standing for it and shouted him down handily. She stood up for her guild and later that week the guild opted to follow Ysabeau’s decision to leave Talisman and reform the guild under a new name without the cancerous presence of Talisman’s guildmaster. She took the GM title of their new guild, Conviction which would later become one of the most accomplished 25man progression guilds on the server.

When I left, I joined a guild named Sanctum Patria where I met another amazing resto shaman cow by the name of Bindi. She was the GM and her significant other Haldor the warrior tank was raid leader. Haldor was a rather… authoritative presence and decisions in raids were almost exclusively his. I think he would be the closest to being a stereotypical raid leader out of all the people I’ve known.

Bindi defined Sanctum Pat’s healing core. She was simply one of the best healer’s I’d ever seen. She was also very supportive of crazy notions like letting me have Retribution as my primary raiding spec at a time when Ret was seen as arguably the worst spec in the game.

I left Sanctum Patria to join the top Horde-side raiding guild on our server, Ascension. Ascension too was GM’ed by a woman. Xarenthel was a rarity: a female GM paladin main-tank. Everything that you’d least expect, that was X. A paladin main-tank in Black Temple (and later Sunwell)? Absurd. A female GM leading the top raiding guild on the server? Unheard of.  She was also very very protective of her position as a tank. She said on more than one occasion when decisions were being made during raids that she “just wanted to tank”, instead of getting roped into bureacracy. She was more hell-bent gung-ho about tanking than nearly every other tank I’d met. X and her officer core fostered an atmosphere of xenophobia and officer-superiority in the guild. My brother joined the guild before me and put out higher dps than the rogue officer and subsequently found himself benched because of it. In Ascension you were hit with sanctions if you outperformed, questioned or otherwise crossed the officers.

There was one officer in Ascension that I did like though: Reyya. She played a mage and I still can’t quite figure out how she managed to do so well on the damage meters in a time when mages were mostly relegated to buffing AI outside the raid entrance and letting the warlocks do the heavy lifting. Her damage output was competitive with anyone else in the raid and she held her own even when compared to combat logs of other progression guilds. She showed up with a deep Frost build one raid night when we were still working on the Illidari Council and I remember feeling scandalized by it. At the end of the night she was still in the top four on damage meters.

Really, the only thing that made being in Ascension worthwhile was being a part of the healing core. This was mostly an elite group of skilled players and more importantly, my friends. I again found myself playing side by side with Salanthe who became the most decorated healer on the Horde side of the server. Being a Holy Paladin, I was mostly “for show” in Tier 6 raids. I often took the role of Salanthe’s dedicated healer because as long as she was alive, people would be getting meaningful heals (nerf chain heal plx) and it wasn’t like my raid healing was anything to get excited about. Sal was either my top healing priority or a close second behind my assigned tank.

Paladins today have it so easy.

In Wrath, I started up a guild with Salanthe and a few other close friends. After dealing with rubbish leadership throughout all of BC we wanted to be despotic tyrants too do things right. We happened to cull a significant number of disgruntled players from Conviction and soon Nocturne was off and running. Aside from about a month and a half at the very beginning Nocturne’s tanks have always been me and Aurorai. Auro is what you’d call a damn fine tank. A patient one too at that for having to put up with a co-tank who’s reckless, impulsive and often needlessly stubborn.

We don’t have a main tank and an offtank in Nocturne. I always hated the distinction as it implied a status inequality. For the most part the “main tank” job is determined by who pulls first. Other times its decided by who has better cooldowns for a certain job or who is simply better at handling a certain fight. There have been a good number of situations where a boss has mowed me down like fresh grass and I’d thereafter cower behind Auro as she deftly tanked the shit out of that same boss.

At the moment, Nocturne’s officers are all males. Salanthe and Amaniita have both stepped down so they could take care of out-of-game affairs which leaves Zindo, Zenhakar and myself. I had always been a bit proud that our officer core was mixed gender-wise and role-wise but the fact that this situation is not the norm for us is still a plus in my view.

* * *

I know, I know this has just been one rambling Shay-centric story of ye olden times of ancient oldness. If you’ve made it this far please know that I am impressed by your persistence.

The point of all this has been to show how my experiences in WoW have very frequently featured capable, intelligent women in a variety of authoritative positions and I believe that my time spent in Azeroth has been the richer for it. Not all these women have been ideal role models for people everywhere. They’ve been complex individuals with their own flaws, weaknesses, prejudices, failings, etc. They’ve also had their own virtues, strengths, standards and triumphs. Almost without exception they’ve all certainly been intensely interesting people, characters fit for grand stories.

When we unjustly marginalize or dismiss other human beings based on sex, race, ethnicity or whatever else, we diminish our own selves and our own experiences too. We rob ourselves of a richer, more interesting and more meaningful existence.

As I’ve said, I’ve been lucky to have had the experiences I’ve had. Thanks for reading.

The date on my hosting expiration rolled over on the 9th. Rolled over by a year. Turns out I dramatically underestimated how much time I had purchased last year and I’m actually good to go for another 12 months!

So what does this mean for you?

Well it means 2fps will still be here for another year.

What does this mean for me?

It means I’m still going to cut back on the blogging for a while but it also means my absence will be a temporary one.

I’m going to make this a month long break which means 2fps will resume activity on August 17th (or so, kinda, maybe).

Tune in again next month!

Way back in the fading twilight of the Burning Crusade I decided I had had enough with the bullshit that characterized the raiding guilds I had seen and resolved to start a new guild. There were a few important keystones for the guild:

• People-focused – No more putting up with sorry excuses for human beings just so we could fill out a raid. If I’m going to spend this much time with you I had better like doing it. One of the talking points we had in the beginning was that we’d rather not raid at all than raid with people we hated.
• Interested – If you joined our guild we wanted you to be interested in the game and how it worked. The original members all enjoyed the frequent nerd talk about spell coefficients, ideal haste/crit balances, etc. We didn’t want to have to tell someone every little thing about everything about how to play simply because someone couldn’t be bothered to care on their own to find out.
• Progression-oriented – In Burning Crusade, this meant something a little different than it does now. Unless you were in one of the premiere guilds on your server you probably didn’t see a lot of endgame raiding content. I was lucky enough to clear everything but Sunwell. The guild I was in at the time of clearing Black Temple and Hyjal was just too horrible and toxic and repugnant to make me want to endure it for one last raid instance, otherwise I would have seen all that BC had to offer. With that idea in mind, we resolved that our guild was going to reach the end. Most the original members again had either cleared everything up to Sunwell or had cleared Sunwell too and we weren’t keen on stalling in Wrath’s Kara equivalent. We were going to see Arthas dead.

Its been a long trip from telling jokes over Vent to try and keep awake during the first phase of the Kel’thuzad encounter to screaming DEFILE IN 5 DEFILE IN 5 DEFILE IN 5 over Mumble but to a great degree, I feel like Nocturne stayed true to its original intent.

I’m waxing nostalgic for a point (this time). Last night, Nocturne downed Arthas for the first time. For so long, this was the benchmark I personally held as a sort of litmus test for the success of the ideas behind the founding of this guild. We had always been lucky in that we raided with friends and that overwhelmingly we were all geeks about knowing stuff about the game. Could we do it all?

Turns out yes, yes we could.

This is the culmination of over a year’s worth of effort and hard work and I know I for one am feeling pretty good about it.

So where does that leave us now? This is certainly the end of a long story. However, Nocturne will continue. We’ll roll Halion over and get excited over the Cataclysm development and when Deathwing pops up and the world breaks we’ll get to work starting all over again.

Some things are done and over though. My hosting for this site expires in, oh about two days. I’m going to take this moment of achievement and completion to hang up my blogging hat. Its conceivable that I’ll pick it up again in the future but for now I’d just like to say thank you for reading.

Suffer well.

I posted recently about a positive relationship that was mostly formed within the context of WoW. Today, I’d like to post about another WoW relationship.

Her character’s name was Mayfair. She came to our guild with her boyfriend with whom she was living and immediately became the darling of the guild. She was born in London, grew up in South Africa and had moved to the States in the last few years. She had a charming, intoxicating accent and was exuberantly friendly.

She and I hit it off immediately. We compared opinions on the best roleplay outfits in WoW, what style high heels we liked in real life, and why we both played Warcraft. She was understanding, intelligent, witty and unfailingly kind throughout our discourse. She feigned reluctance to speak in vent for a short time but quickly stole the mic as it were from everyone else. She enraptured the men of the guild by doing a spot-on impression of Lois Griffin from Family Guy and by being juuuuuust slightly flirtatious. Tasteful of course but flirtatious.

I became good friends with her because she understood the massive problems the guild had lurking beneath the surface. Favortism, ignorance, cliques, etc. She understood everything. The problems I had only discovered after months of thought and experience she picked up on almost immediately. She had a gift for perception.

We stayed up late many nights on ventrilo where she would listen to the rantings I had against the guild, against the injustices I perceived and she was nothing but encouraging when I talked about crazy ideas like starting my own guild. She was as good a friend as any.

After I left that guild I stayed in touch with her. Not long afterwards, she and one of our other mutual friends left the guild as well under bad circumstances. I asked if she had any interest in helping me form a new guild like we had always talked about but she was reticent for a reason I couldn’t fathom. I also didn’t fully understand why she was clinging to this other mutual friend with whom she had left the guild.

It didn’t matter to me, I only wanted her to be happy as she played. We stayed in contact for a while but our relationship fizzled slowly over time. I always wondered what had happened to her after I lost contact with her when it appeared she no longer played the game.

Fast forward a year and a half.

A few friends from that same guild Mayfair and I had both left so long ago suddenly appeared out of nowhere. I was happy to rediscover them and asked how Mayfair was doing and that’s when I learned the truth about her.

She was a con artist.

She wasn’t from London, probably hadn’t ever been to South Africa. She had stolen thousands of dollars from the boyfriend she was with when I first met her and had run away with the mutual friend with whom she left the guild at the end of the Burning Crusade. No doubt he too had fallen under her siren song and would be exploited, stolen from and abandoned. This was not the first, nor would it be the last time that this woman had assumed an identity with the ultimate goal to rob, steal and plunder.

I can’t help but wonder how much of my relationship with her was false. Its obviously best to assume it was all false, that she was always playing a game with me. Still, we spent many nights talking about things that I guess really only mattered to me. It was her constant reassurance that gave me the resolve to eventually form Nocturne some time later. She didn’t get anything out of those late night, private discussions. I know she was probably assessing whether or not I had anything she wanted but still, her guile and her illusions were so perfect that even now that I know exactly what she is I still can’t help but fall for them a tiny bit.

She’s still out there somewhere and while I feel sympathy for her victims past and present I still can’t help but be grateful that I knew her.

She’s very, very, very good at what she does.

Guys, I have but one thing to say to you all today and it is this:

STOP WHAT YOU’RE DOING

Yes, MMOChamp has “new” talent trees out so what do 99% of people seemingly think of this?

OMG THAT’S WHAT THE CATA TREES ARE GOING TO BE LIKE!!1

I’m baffled. This is not a new process that Blizzard has when it comes to developing talent trees. They start with a baseline, in our case that baseline is the existing talent trees currently live in WotLK, and then they iterate on that baseline THROUGHOUT THE ALPHA, BETA AND THE LIVE EXPANSION ITSELF.

The idea that these are “finished” talent trees or even mostly complete talent trees is ludicrous. They’re giving us an idea of how things are shaping in the alpha at the moment, that’s pretty much all. Remember that post I did a while back about the history and evolution of the Death Knight class? Of course not because you didn’t read it. That’s ok, I’ll go over the gist of it again.

This is what the talent trees looked like for Death Knights during the WotLK alpha.

This is what the talent trees looked like for Death Knights during the WotLK beta.

This is what the talent trees look like for Death Knights currently.

Do you get it? There’s a lot of changes between those three setups and there were many more changes in between them too. This is the process that ALL classes are going to be put through in the months ahead.

Stop assuming these new talent trees are anything close to what you’re going to see the first day of Cata. They’re not. At the moment they’re pretty roughshod with only minor initial changes. THESE TALENT TREES ARE GOING TO CHANGE DRASTICALLY. So drastically, all your conclusions about what you’re seeing right now will be completely irrelevant.

Really, all this shows us is how much work they have yet to do to get Cata ready for even the beta testing.

You’re getting a look at an evolving organism. Don’t mistake it for anything else.