Hi, you’ve got through to Righteous Orbs.

Tamarind and Chastity aren’t here to write updates right now, due to the Edinburgh Festival.

In the meantime here is a picture of a kitten.

Back in a week, after which time I confidently expect Cataclysm to have a firm release date, and the DK frost tree to have tier one talents that aren’t useless filler.

Nobody does the level 58-60 dungeons anymore because you can go straight to Outland, and, to be honest, I’ve had very little experience of them myself – I’ve paid maybe one or two tourism visits in my WoW career, and I’ve always been well over the level range so although I’ve appreciated them as places, or as designs, I’ve never really understood what they were like to run.

This is what they are like to run:

(Screenshot courtesy of Issy: I was too busy swearing and dying)

Tanking Dire Maul was like … God … I have no words. Let me put my reaction in the form of a graph:

I mean, seriously, it was like I walked through the door and Blizzard was like “Why, hello there, Tam, I see you’re a paladin tank, good for you, we’re now going to take a tender part of your anatomy and put it in a vice. HOW DO YOU LIKE TANKING NOW, BITCH?”

In Dire Maul there are mobs, right, come in packs of three or four …

…that silence you

…aaaand then eat all your mana.

(And then tell you you’re crap in bed).

I mean talk about how to render a paladin tank completely useless in 2.4seconds.

And then there are these packs of ogres, containing 2 caster type ogres at the back, and 2 ME SMASH TAMARIND type ogres in the front. And I have done my tanking research, I know how I’m theoretically supposed to deal with casters. Like this:

Except what would happen in practice is that I’d throw my holy Frisbee of ogre silencing and, I don’t know, the two caster-type ogres would be positioned just slightly too far apart so instead of ricocheting from one to the other, driving the whole group forward, my holy Frisbee would just become embedded in ogre blubber and stay there. The consequence of which would be: the two smashy ogres would be all “hey, you stuck a Frisbee in our friend in the sissy robe” and come charging forward, the silenced ogre would skulk forward for the 3 seconds in which he was silenced and then stand still and start casting, and then the unsilenced caster the back would just hammer into me happily with magic. Oh yes, and the smashy ogres cripple you as well. And I know you’re supposed to strafe round and all that, but it’s bloody difficult when four ogres are beating you and you’re trying to dispel a cripple on yourself.

So, yeah, this just in: tanking is fucking hard.

Part of it, of course, just my inexperience. I can do simple positioning, I can LoS pull, I can keep my healer from dying, I can maintain threat, I know to put my back to a wall when there’s a knock-back effect, I know that it’s important to gather up casters so they don’t blast the shit out of the delicate types at the back, and I know to turn things that vomit or cleave or do otherwise AoE type nastiness away from the raid. But the complex maneuvers required to keep a large group of mobs, all of whom are attacking at a subtly different distance, in front of me are still a bit shaky. In all honesty.

Part of it, of course, just my inexperience. I can do simple positioning, I can LoS pull, I can keep my healer from dying, I can maintain threat, I know to put my back to a wall when there’s a knock-back effect, I know that it’s important to gather up casters so they don’t blast the shit out of the delicate types at the back, and I know to turn things that vomit or cleave or do otherwise AoE type nastiness away from the party. But the complex maneuvers required to keep a large group of mobs, all of whom are attacking at a subtly different distance, in front of me are still a bit shaky. In all honesty.

And I think another part of the problem, actually, is tanking in a pug. Yeah, that’s right, blame the pugs. It’s not that I’m not very good, it’s the pugs, I tell ya, the damn pugs. I mean there are several ways you can tank more effectively – take time to position, consider each pull strategically, use LoS – but the effectiveness of tanking in a pug is measured on one thing and one thing alone: speed. Which is, of course, entirely dependent on over-gearing the instance. I mean, I can roll through BRD and look like an awesome tank, with very little effort involved. It’s partially just knowledge of the instance, which mobs can be safely chain-pulled, how to deal with a certain group of casters, practice and familiarity, and all that, coming together to allow for tanking largely without thought.

But when I’m in new territory I do actually require thinking time. I mean, not hours, not minutes of it, I’m not standing there going “uhhhh” with drool falling out my mouth, I mean a second or two to consider how I’m going to attempt to pull an unfamiliar group of creatures without leading to them running amok or munching on the healer. Of course, if you pause for so much as millisecond in a pug, either somebody will starting shouting gogogogogo at you or someone will helpfully pull for you (usually a hunter or a DK…) which means you have to actually run in there half-baked, wasting unnecessary taunts and cooldowns, and you spend all your energy trying to establish control of the pull. Gah.

We wiped so many times that in the end our frustrated pugees – a level 61 DK who was making no attempt to throttle his threat, I was glad to have driven away, and a rather decent resto shammy I wasn’t, – all abandoned us. Whereupon we decided to 3-man it, at level 58, as a paladin, a warrior and a shammy with no cc, so not the smartest move in the world but, bizarrely, once we got over the “holy fuck this is difficult” moment, it was actually far easier than with the 2 pugees bitching and moaning behind us.

I think there was a sort of crunch point, after which it got easier still, where we realised that careless, kamikaze tanking (as is the accepted mode nowadays) wasn’t going to get us through. So we ended up winding the game back about 2 years and we used every trick in the book, mainly LoS pulling and positioning to be fair, to get through. And by taking it slowly, considering each group, marking up a kill order and actually taking time to discuss a strategy with each other we slowly, very slowly, conquered Dire Maul. I know it’s basically pretty simple (pull a bunch of ogres, hide under a ramp) but it makes you feel clever, but doing simple things that make you feel clever is deeply satisfying.

The other thing is about it, I think I learned more about tanking in three (lengthy) trips to Dire Maul than I did in the previous 30 levels. I’m not putting on my Dumbing It Down For the Casuals hat, or getting elitist about the virtues of things being hard, but overgearing everything – as one currently does what with heirlooms and the ability shift associated with tacking 20 more levels onto the end of a game – does make you incredibly complacent. Every time I get a new tanking ability I make a commitment to use it at least once in the next dungeon I run (unless it’s completely unhelpful) so I form the habit and get a handle on my class but actually you can get through using only holy Frisbee and lolsecrate.

And I’m not a good paladin tank by any means – I am very much a paladin tank with L plates – but really it wasn’t until I hit Dire Maul that I realised how much I had to learn about. And perhaps that’s because I’m a cocky idiot who is overly inclined to think I’m an awesome at stuff until painfully proven otherwise but actually I’m really glad I didn’t faceroll my way into Outland without a clue. I guess what I’m trying to say is that if I’m serious about my own-found inclination to stand at the front in my non-sissy platemail that it would help if I knew what the hell I was doing.

The sad thing is, I suspect I could get quite a long way without really knowing all that much about tanking. And I also reckon that even though folks in the heroic LFG grind are pretty unforgiving there’s an extent to which gear and apathy completely diminish the distance between a good tank and a bad tank. Back when I was a new priest on the block, I really noticed when I had a good tank, and the whole group suffered from a bad one. Nowadays I don’t care, it makes absolutely no different to the outcome – which is 2 frost badges I don’t really need for the price of tedium. It actually takes 4 really abysmally bad players to sabotage a run. The other day I remember thinking a tank was rather squishy, inspected him at the end of the run and realised he was nowhere near def-cap and wearing just about the worst itemized set of ungemmed blues and purples I had ever seen. I know skill is not about gear but wearing the right gear, even if it’s not the best gear, is some kind of indicator.

Of course, I’m also simultaneously attempting to druid heal my way 80 (currently languishing at 73, and it feels like I’ve spent a lifetime at 73) via LFG, and the cracks are beginning to show again. Heirlooms compensate a bit at this level but I have no idea from what dank hole of ineptitude the average pre-80 Northrend tank has crawled. And it’s all such banal failure as well – stupid things like massively over-pulling, not controlling the mobs at all, getting knocked back into other mobs, pulling when I’m on a mana break. I resent these wipes because they’re completely unnecessary. I have a friend in SAN who is also leveling to 80 at the same time as me – he’s one of those lifestyle tanks, as I’m a lifestyle healer, and when we run dungeons together we haven’t had a single wipe. Not one.

The difference is, I suppose, that nobody is geared enough to compensate, so we’re expected to play like we know what the hell we’re doing. And I can’t work out if it’s laziness, a genuine failure to adapt from running heroics at 80 in ICC gear, or the fact that nobody has really had to learn how to do their bloody job because they could previously rely on rolling over stuff with heirlooms and AoE!lol. As, err, I was.

Anyway, I don’t normally do achievement spam but this is one I’m genuinely proud of:

I’ve kind of turned my inability to find, and stay, in a guild into a sort of self-directed joke – well, it’s easier than getting depressed about it, which is the other alternative. And I am actually enjoying my whistle-stop-tour through a bunch of innocent guilds – it’s really rather educative, although in some ways probably slightly unfair on the guilds as I’m increasingly buying into the notion that I’m a person who doesn’t stay in guilds which means I’ll probably end up being a person who doesn’t stay in guilds. I’ve given up on nearly all of my ambitions – I don’t expect to kill the Lich King any time soon, but as long as I get a few decent raids under my belt, that’ll keep me going until Cataclysm.

I’ll just say in advance of this blog post, which is going to be a general musing on the theme of guilds, that I’m well aware the problem here is largely me. I do actually have more than 10 friends (outside Azeroth I mean, and yes I counted, and no one of them isn’t a murloc) so I can’t be so insanely fanatical and unreasonable that I’m incapable of forming human relationships. But, as a general rule, I do have extremely low tolerance for ignorance, stupidity, and prejudice – and an unfortunate sense of self-righteousness means that I associate shutting up with complicity with the aforementioned. Couple this with a lack of experience in working with others and a natural impatience with authority and I’m a fucking disaster.

I mention this because I just wanted to be clear that I haven’t considered the problem and come to the clearly erroneous conclusion that the issue is inherently with the guilds and not with me. Of course it’s generally easier to blame THE SYSTEM MAN THE SYSTEM than yourself but I do think guilds are not unproblematic in themselves. Moreover I think a lot of the issues with the way guilds work are so embedded in our perception of what a guild is, and should be, that they’re taken for granted as part of guild life. Possibly Cataclysm will change all this anyway but for the moment indulge me in the identification of some of these problems.

Transparency, Power & Authority

Most guilds I have encountered are heedlessly oligarchic: the guild is run by a cohort of the GM and his officers (who may, or may not, come across as an almost impenetrable clique) but often the question I find myself asking, when I watch the way power is wielded and authority imposed, is “why is that person an officer at all?” Again, not to get bogged down by argumentum ad dictionary, but I think it is easy to forget that an officer is one who holds an office. And although I’ve run into some guilds who have clearly demarcated roles for their officers, e.g a recruitment officer, a website officer, and so on, it is not entirely clear to me why the skills required to moderate the forum or be the ranged DPS lead are presumed transferable with the skills required to manage to day to day admin of the guild, or deal with a raid scheduling clash, introduce a new player to the guild or calm a personality dispute. And it all seems so deliberately opaque: rare has been the occasion on which a guildie has been promoted and I’ve thought to myself “Yes, I can see why that happened, I can see what you bring.” And obviously I’m just a guild member, I can’t be expected to understand the intricacies of guild process but there’s also an extent to which most guild hierarchies actually occlude their members from gaining insight into the power structures they support.

I’ve been meaning to blog about Big Crits for a while but actually it serves as an excellent example of this in practice: obviously the perspective of the viewer is at an even greater remove than the perspective of your average guildie but the power dynamics at play are honestly incomprehensible. Talking about Bit Crits is quite difficult because you keep having to remind yourself that these are real people and not fictional constructs it’s okay to diss, but, as is often the case with slightly badly put together reality TV, Chas and I are completely obsessed with a completely inconsequential detail. Specifically: The Mysterious Mystery Of Cancerboss, a peculiarly opaque character who is nevertheless apparently AN INCREDIBLE TANK AND AWESOME PERSON WHO IS TOTALLY SUITED FOR OFFICERSHIP OH YES, or so Stoneybaby – in the throes of a passionate bromance – assures us.

But since Cancerboss never speaks for himself, and the only occasions on which we hear him he’s (ineptly) haranguing the raid, and the guild members do occasionally makes “jokes” about what a dick he is, it is impossible to gain any real understanding of his value to the guild. Or to anyone, really. I remember Stoneybaby saying something to the effect that Cancerboss is the one who believes in you more than you believe in yourself – but since his way of showing this seems to be yelling that people suck, we remain unconvinced. I personally would not like Cancerboss to believe in me. I know this is a problem largely with the format – and Cancerboss is probably a perfectly average human being, albeit one with a really stupid name – but it is actually very revealing of the opacity of guild power structures and promotions. I mean, from the way it comes across, it does honestly seem like Stoneybaby woke up one morning and decided to promote Cancerboss, which leaves the viewer – proudly wearing their Furioso For President badge – genuinely bewildered. And I’ve never been in a guild where it seemed to work any more transparently. Guild members are expected to aspire to officership – as it’s really the only trajectory available to them for acknowledgement of value to the guild – but the mechanisms and the path, and the decision-making progress, are largely shrouded in mystery.

A story from a few guilds back: not long after a member was recently promoted to officer for undisclosed services to the guild, there was a bit of tension in guild chat over an “invitation only” raid. A couple of members were understandably angry, and as the only officer on-line the new officer was fielding the backlash. Well, I say fielding, in the middle of their perfectly justified and moderately expressed concerns, he said something like “Fuck it, I didn’t even put the thing on the calendar and now you’re all just going to rip me a new one” and logged off. And I remember thinking to myself: “wow, you handled that really really badly.” And I am no Master of Diplomacy.

I had my brief, unhappy fling with officership because I wanted to do work FOR the guild, and it seemed the only way to get a real say in the way the guild worked, but all it did was take me further from the guild as a whole, and inculcate me into the sort of power structures that make me uncomfortable. The thing is, I acknowledge the need for administration, organisation and leadership in a large, or extremely progression-orientated guild but in a small casual guild … I find it harder to swallow. And I increasingly wonder why so much guild business is hidden from members – partially, I’m sure, it’s because it’s tedious but since members are intelligent, aware, insightful human beings if there are problems chances are they will already have identified them. And obviously if you are a guild member you don’t want to have to worry about, say, recruiting more tanks, but if there’s a tank shortage you’ve probably noticed, and it would be reassuring, I think, to know that the tank issue has been spotted and is being handled. There is really no reason – as far as I can see – that guild business shouldn’t be open to all.

I know guilds work in different ways, and what works for one may not work for others, and that ’serious’ guilds benefit from a more militaristic approach, but I don’t like the fact the default structure as hardcoded into the game is often adopted without thought or question. I think my current guild functions as meritocratic despotism: the GL is all powerful, ruthless and merciless, as only a 16 year old could be. We all know exactly where we stand, which is very very carefully. And I suspect the system will function perfectly until I cross the line, and earn his ire, whereupon I’ll rant about its inherent unfairness. But currently I like it because he has no hesitation whatsoever is blasting idiots and timewasters out of the sky. And the other advantage of it is that the progression path is very clear: perform well, get what you want, it really is that simple. And bear in mind that I’ve come from a guild where I sat on the bench for a month, with no hope of ever getting off it short of murdering every other priest in the guild, and maybe not even then. Talk about dead man’s sandals of consecration.

And a further problem with the opaque power structures of a lot of guilds is the largely unavoidable consequence of perceived clique-iness. Whether it is conscious or not, the GM and the officers are literally a clique: a group of people that cannot be joined without an explicit invitation. They’re at the centre of guild life, they know more, they do more, and they work more closely with each other than they do with other people in the guild. Because guilds are structured like a workplace, with an integral promotion structure, progression through the hierarchy is the assumed trajectory for all members. People expect to get promoted as a result of being the guild, or doing things in the guild, but ultimately since there is no clear path up the hierarchy, and the workings of the hierarchy are closed to most guild members, there is actually no way for members to gain any recognition of their value to the guild. This wouldn’t be a problem if people did not expect to be recognised this way, but that is ultimately how guild structures are assumed to function.

An Impossible Balancing Act

The other thing that strikes me about guilds is that they’re functionally impossible to maintain. The ideal number of raiders for an individual is exactly 10, where one of the 10 is you. The ideal number of raiders for a 10-man team for a guild is 18. I’ve said this before. But what I didn’t say is that there is literally no way to balance this – if you don’t have enough people, there is upset; if it is perceived that you have too many, there is upset. People always want more, but are desperately afraid of losing what they have. Equally at the point of trying to field 25-man raids you’re having to make genuine decisions about people versus warm bodies versus committment to the guild versus gear versus skill. I mean, are you going to piss off more people by having a raid but some wankers on board, or are you going to piss off more people by cancelling a raid due to lack of sign ups. It’s very much a cycle of damned if you do, damned if you don’t, and combine this with the lack of transparency in the system and a perceived promotion path that is less of a path than trap for Heffalumps and all you get are guild members living on the edge of a nervous breakdown, clinging desperately to raid spots and to roles, just in case they one day get benched, or asked to break out their healing OS, and never get unbenched or permitted to DPS ever again.

Hmmm, this is very gloomy, it’s possible my time in Cowslip Warren affected me more than I realised. Time to break out the Nihlistic doom rabbit poetry … Where are you going, stream? Far, far away … Beyond the heather, sliding away all night … Take me with you, stream, away in the starlight. Um, anyway. All I’m trying to say is that I couldn’t understand why people would react so badly to recruitment and the occasional benching in my previous guild; my time in Cowslip Warren has taught my precisely why people are twitchy about it. And obviously a guild with sensible and trusted leadership should be able to navigate the twitchiness but it really is a knife edge in balancing the needs and wants of the people in the guild with the needs and wants of the guild itself, since the priorities of the individual are rarely the priorities of the group.

Where do we go from here?

I, err, don’t actually have a destination in mind. But guilds can blatantly function on a model that differs from the one built into to game: I mean SAN is a proud pantocracy, and Gelvon’s guilds seem to work extremely successfully as Cults of Personality.

If I was feeling wildly experimental, I would perhaps suggest this for a Cataclysm project: a 10 man guild of literally 10 members. You wouldn’t have to worry about cliques because, err, you’d be one. Equally, with a guild so small you could, in fact, dispense with most of the usual power structures: no need for officers, no need really for a GL apart from the actual mechanical necessity of having one, but perhaps you could pass it round like the last After Eight mint to prevent anybody getting delusions of grandeur. And actually because you wouldn’t be playing The Impossible Balancing Act game, guild admin would be much reduced, since you wouldn’t have to worry about recruitment, and juggling the competing priorities of individuals within the guild.

Everybody would have a guaranteed raid spot, so there’d be no bench-related angst, and you wouldn’t have to have a person who had the specifically miserable job of telling people they couldn’t raid tonight. Of course, you’d have to pug a fair bit since being dependent on all ten people to show up would put far too much pressure on the individuals involved but, hey, as long as you can provide the spine of a raid, a decent degree of competence and a vent channel then you still control the raid. The necessity of pugging would counteract the gated community feel as well, and stop people turning into pug-allergic xenophobes who only want to interact with each other.

And the guild would be small enough to run as some kind of … I don’t know … republic or city-state, completely transparently, giving everyone an equal say in how the guild functioned. Of course it would have to be the right ten people, willing to work together and take joint responsibility for a guild.

But it’s not the maddest idea I’ve ever had. I did, after all, think of this on a day during which I’m also considering replacing all my sp gems with int gems. Well, since I am mainly raid-healing as disco on 25-mans it strikes me that the quantity of the bubbles is more important than the strength of the bubbles.

Hmmm…maybe I have gone nuts.

I couldn’t hack Cowslip Warren – the air of depressed desperation became unbearable. I left relatively politely after yet another failure to navigate the labyrinthine and political travails of the raid sign up system. I managed to get into a few alt, gearing or social raids but there came a point when – as much as I liked the people – it felt perilously close to exploitation. I mean it’s all very well to help people gear their alts or get experience and so on and so forth, but when the guild is essentially using your ICC geared main to run other people through Naxx (y’know, I love Naxx but I’d rather stick pencils up my nose than run through it in ICC gear again, it’ll just turn me into Snottydin and I’ll be all “I could solo heal this lol”) and can’t even get you an ICC run … it’s just not worth it.

I still don’t understand how that guild functioned, or why people stuck around in it. All their written stuff seemed so sane, as well, and they’re still recruiting. By rights, their recruitment post should read:

[Name of guild] is recruiting ICC geared raiders to stand around like lemons feeling bad about themselves while our 10-man team downs content.

Ah well. Once more I thought of slinking into obscurity and giving up on this raiding lark entirely until Cataclysm but then I thought to myself: Tam, why be oppressed by constant failure? Kick the football, Charlie Brown. So I scoured the realm forums, and there were a few guilds recruiting. I don’t know why I picked the one I eventually did – they didn’t have the best name or the most arresting pitch. But they needed healers and were only slightly more progressed than me so I thought I’d have hope of actually contributing, whereas with a hardmode guild I’d just be chasing in their footsteps.

I whispered the GM to ask if he had time to answer a few questions and, ye Gods, I gave the guy a mini inquisition. It went on and on and on and on but he was happy to answer and, at the end of it, I made an application, and was accepted.

I settled in fairly comfortably, being TOTALLY LAID BACK. A few days after that, we made a very creditable attempt at ICC-25 and I was very happy indeed. I like the intimacy, and the reliance on the whole team, of a 10-man but sometimes a 25-man is just plain old fashioned exciting. Also I somehow contrived to be the only disco priest in the entire raid so it was a bubble-spammers paradise. I can see why disco is so popular at the moment – it’s nice to have a niche. Any old damage reverser can heal, but only a disco priest can mitigate. Overhealing is naturally very low, because you bubble and move on, and because there’s always somebody you could be bubbling your output is very high. In short, it’s pretty easy to look awesome. Even with recount not tracking mitigation I was keeping up with a resto shammy. Flex.

Anyway, enough of this wowcocking, what’s wrong with the guild. Because there are laws against me actually being happy somewhere. Well, here goes: over time it became gradually apparent, not through behaviour but because of a few remarks about their lives that people made, that the average age of the guild was low. Honestly quite low. Now I don’t see myself as myself as decrepit quite yet (although I am now considerably closer to 30 than I am to 20 – shit, how did that happen) but when your GL, and his officercore, are between the ages of 16-19, it does give one pause. Not least of all because you’re liable to spend raids wondering if the RL should really be doing his homework.

Also there is nothing like hanging about with a bunch of teenagers to make you feel like the lamest person in the world. I mean, I remember when I was growing up, there was this 20 year old who used to hang around a bit with my group of friends. And we all thought he was the coolest, most awesome person ever because he was, like, God, 20, man! And it wasn’t until I actually got to 20 that I thought to myself: “what a minute, what was that 20 year old doing spending time with a bunch of 16 year olds? What a loser.”

Of course, I know the situation in WoW isn’t quite the same – I mean one of the great things about WoW is that gives you something in common with, and connection to, people who you might otherwise never talk to. And there’s probably … hopefully … a slightly difference in going out of your way to hang out with 16 year olds (creeeeeeepy) and doing an activity that coindentally might occasionally bring you into contact with 16 year olds. Actually that sounds even creepier. God. Yikes.

And actually when you stop and think about it for a moment a guild with a low average age makes no LESS sense that anything else in WoW. I mean, my thought process went something like this: “zomg, my GL is 16, what the hell does a 16 year old know about leading a guild? Wait a minute, what the hell do I know about leading a guild.” I think the thing about being ostensibly a grownup is that you can lay claim to real life experiences that supposedly give you experience and insight into, y’know, managing people. But then managing people and leading people are not necessarily the same thing – and more often than not those who pride themselves on their leadership skills are those least capable of leading. I was surprised, actually, at the intelligence and maturity of the leader and officerteam – and then I realised what an arse I was for feeling surprised. I think it’s too easy to invest in the values we ascribe to adulthood, while forgetting also the complications and failings. I’m not saying that WoW isn’t full of childish teenagers but it’s also full of childish adults.

Life in Never Neverland is strange but good. It’s enough to make one yearn a little bit for uncomplicated youth, while at the same time being glad to be done with it. I think the problem with being an adult, and feeling passionately about a computer game like WoW, is that there’s always a little part of you that’s self-conscious about it. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think we SHOULD be, but I think we are. It’s impossible not to be when gaming is still far from acknowledged as a worthwhile adult hobby. My friends know I play WoW but I minimise how much I care about it. I need to keep it as far away from my professional sphere as possible. And even if you are, err, out and proud about your computer game habits I think very few of us, when we imagined what being a grown up was when we were children, imagined it as involving a greater freedom to play computer games, and eat an entire packet of Haribo instead of dinner.

Furthermore, I think when we play WoW we also play out our adult frustrations and insecurities to the game – the person with a tedious dayjob can vanquish internet dragons instead, the person who couldn’t be trusted to manage a tin of beans can be a successful (or maybe not) guild leader, the person who has never achieved anything of any particular merit can top the DPS meters, the temporarily unemployed person can hit goldcap. Sometimes I think what we bring to the game is our knowledge of failure. The more you live, the more likely failure becomes – and I don’t mean this in a necessarily negative way, it’s just coming to terms with the inevitably of fucking up is a large part of being an adult, I think. But there’s something invincible about the denizens of Never Neverland. And I envy their inhibited pleasure in the game – they’re obsessed with their DPS not because they want, or need, to feel better about themselves or they have to assert their value to the expense of others, but because big numbers are awesome, and they really do just love playing WoW. I’m not saying, by the way, that WoW is this horrible, unhealthy dumping ground of all our adult woes – I just think there’s a freedom in the wholesale embrace of something fun for its own sake, that we’re often expected to put aside as adults.

They think I’m some kind of weird alien, by the way, from the Planet Healz – I don’t think it’s ever crossed their minds that someone could feel the same way about healing that they do about DPS.

The raid I went on was … well … kind of hilarious. In the best possible way. I don’t think I’ve ever encountered such an uninhibitedly expressive RL. I’m used to the dry voice, suppressed emotion, a little bit of ironic distance. But this RL talks pretty much constantly, not just to call out the necessary alerts but to push the raid forward. There’s a degree to which it’s intellectually unhelpful – being the equivalent of the notorious “axe throwers, hurl faster” military strategy from the Gunship battle. I mean there’s an extent to which being told to do more DPS, or to heal the raid more, isn’t going to make you do more DPS or heal the raid more, as there’s an actual limit on what you can achieve – but it’s weirdly motivating. I mean, the first time he responded to Precious’s decimate by shouting joyously: “raid heal raid heal raid heal raid heal” I was inclined to get snippy. I mean, what did he think I was doing?! I know what my fucking job is. But, being LAID BACK, I made a mental adjustment, interpreting it as encouragement rather than instruction. And actually although there is a hard limit on what you can achieve, I think human beings do actually perform better with someone to yell at them. Otherwise army bases would be quiet, restrained places wouldn’t they?

The other thing I enjoy about Super!Expressive RL is that, in silence, the emotional experience of a raid – the tension, the adrenaline, the moments of anxiety, the moments of satisfaction – can feel quite isolating. Like you’re all in your own boxes, in your own world, until the moment of victory which you share. But with somebody, however unconsciously, enacting it for you – it feels much more social somehow. And the raid becomes a whole entity of its own, not just the combination of 25 individuals. And it brings together the healing, the tanking and the DPS – you know when the DPS are pushing themselves, you know when it’s all down to the healers to keep the tanks alive, you know the sticky moments when the tank nearly fell over or when a particularly squishy warlock nearly bought the dust. It makes for intense fights and intense victories.

I’m a moderately talkative RL but I’m not sure I’d have the guts to be quite that invested. I’d be too afraid of looking silly. And there is, honestly, an extent to which he does look a bit silly; but a much larger extent to which it doesn’t matter in the slightest.

I’m not sure how long my sojourn in Never Neverland will last. I might be blogging two days hence along the lines of “fucking teenagers, I can’t fucking stand them, I wish they’d just grow the fuck up.” Or I might get chased off by a crocodile. But who knows. It’s possible I find it easier to be LAID BACK because I don’t have high expectations, so they constantly surpass them. But also it seems a commitment to the production of Big Numbers minimises politics, and that can be only to the good.

I read Peter Pan again fairly recently actually – it’s one of those children’s books actually written for adults, I think, Disney re-interpretations aside. It’s rare to find a nostalgic depiction of the wonders of childhood that also recognises the limitations of childhood and the validity and necessity of adulthood. I always find the last line strangely haunting:

When Margaret grows up she will have a daughter, who is to be Peter’s mother in turn; and thus it will go on, so long as children are gay and innocent and heartless.

I think that says something of the essence of childhood, or youth. It seems like a strange combination: the idea of innocence, joyousness and a certain type of cruelty. Never Neverland doesn’t have much patience for human frailty, nor is it somewhere that Captain Hook with his adult insecurities can flourish, but at the very least it’s an awfully big adventure.

**siren alert**

Not about WoW, Not about WoW, Brace for Impact

**end of siren**

Some time ago, I wrote a lengthy post about my experiences with Dragon Age. This is going to be another lengthy post about Dragon Age, since, inspired largely by the discussion on that very post and the news about Dragon Age II, I’ve lately re-visited the game. Also … did I emphasise lengthy? Oh and spoilers – obviously.

I did actually try to play it again after I finished it the first time but I generally need to put some distance between my first attempt and my second before I can successfully re-play a game. I think it’s because the first attempt still exists in the mind as too much of a concrete reality so everything you do in your second attempt is a reaction against what you did in the first. This makes you so preoccupied with the outcome of your decisions, that the actual process of playing the game becomes nothing more than a hoop to jump through in your quest for Difference. It becomes a rebound attempt if you will.

Strangely, I’m enjoying Dragon Age more this time round, I think partially because I’m already aware of the limitations in the game and therefore I’m more accepting of them. I’m not placing emotional investment where the game cannot support it and, because I’ve already played it once, I’m much more liberated in closing down avenues of content. The problem with influence mechanics, for example, is that, as you gain influence with NPCs, you gain not only game mechanical benefits but more story, more content (the prime gameplay reward in an RPG) for doing it, whereas in alienating people you get squat. Perhaps it’s my own problem in that I can’t divorce the wants of the person playing the game with my attempt to play character in the game, but it does mean that the roleplaying will often take a backseat to my own intellectual curiosity the first time I play a game. I just want to get STUFF (not literal stuff, content stuff).

I tend to prefer my second play-throughs of game for precisely this reason: there’s more of a sense of ownership. This time round, I told Alistair to stop being a whiny bitch, for example. He doesn’t like me much, and he’s probably not going to confide in me any time soon, but it was deeply, deeply satisfying.

The other territory I found hard to navigate in my first playthrough was the in-built thematic territory of duty versus personal love the game is pretty determined for you to enact with tragic consequences. I remember Spinks saying that as a dwarven commoner not overly bogged down in ethical concerns, she had a much easier time of it. So this time round I’m a human noble. I played him slightly immature and deeply sheltered through the introductory segment, precisely so he could take the death of his parents really really badly. As if there’s any way of taking it well. But he went down the angsty fantasy hero route of concluding that there is no justice, only strength, that love is fleeting, and life is cheap. His primary motivation through the plot is getting vengeance of Arl Howe – I am hoping that when I finally confront the bastard, I get the dialogue option: “Hello, my name is [CHARNAME], you killed my mother, prepare to die.”

My primary travelling companion is, err, my imba melee dps dog. Who loves me no matter what and doesn’t judge me for my tough moral decisions. If only there more NPCs like him.

But I also get on really well with Morrigan, who is a pleasure to have in your party although it’s frustrating that she doesn’t recognize she’s in a computer game. Very often the game will require that we do something annoying and she’ll demand to know why we’re wasting time on this pointless quest and there isn’t, unfortunately, a dialogue option where I can share her frustrations but explain we need to do it to progress the plot. But there is something quite meta-textual about Morrigan: we spend a lot of time engaged in joint mockery of the rest of the game. She’s my new favourite (Alistair, it used to be you, but you shat on my heart and whined all the time).

And my other party member is the dreaded Zevran Dudecorset, who I will talk about later.

I have a few semi-disconnected further thoughts about Dragon Age inspired by this second play through, which I will inflict on you.

Wall Breakers as follows:

1. The Problem with Canon
2. Optimal Choices
3. Not Gay If It’s an Elf

The Problem with Canon

Playing a male human noble (I really should have called myself Genericus, for I am very generic) has really opened my eyes to the reality of the Bioware canon, and just how much it has an impact on the game. The problem with Bioware games – Mass Effect openly so – is that, for games that are supposedly centered on player choices, there is a specifically “canon” narrative – the character and the decisions and the outcome of those decisions that is the “true” heart of the game as the designers pictured it. I understand why is the necessary, one cannot have branches of choice without a tree, and there must be a definitive continuity to take from one game to the next (for example if you don’t important a save game from ME1, ME2 begins with Wrex and Ashely dead [nooooo!], and the council also dead). But there’s an extent to which an awareness of there being a canon saturates the games in they don’t acknowledge as well as ways they do, and it’s the unacknowledged influence of this rather rigid conception “canon” that causes the problem.

Bioware’s Shepard looks like this:

Mine like this:

(She’s so hawt and ruthless lookin)

And although you do have the freedom to the design your own Shepard, the ‘default’ or ‘standard’ Shepardd is a white male. And you might say: what does this matter, if I can also choose to be a black female Shepherd if I want but the point is that you Shepard will always be “other” to the intentions and conceptions of the designer. For example, when asked where there was no possibility of homosexual romance in Mass Effect, Bioware came back with two answers. The first:

We still view it as… if you’re picturing a PG-13 action movie.

Because a love scene in which the involved parties are of the same sex is automatically not PG-13? Oh come on, Bioware, get a fucking clue. I know homosexuality is often rated higher than heterosexuality but I find the notion that simply its inclusion as an option would change the whole atmopshere of Mass Effect from a PG-13 action movie into some else deeply offensive.

If you really swapped the male Shepard for a female one, would there really be a difference here? The ‘rating’ of a lovescene is the way it’s presented, and its context, it’s not the gender of the involved parties.

And the second reason is this:

Sometimes, in some of our games, we are going to have a defined character with a more defined view. Almost like a third-person narrative

Which, if you take away the PR-speak boils down very simply into this: “you can’t have a homosexual romance in Mass Effect because Shepard is not gay.”

To take this back to Dragon Age: the canon protagonist, the person about whom the game is written, is a male human noble. Everything that frustrated me about Dragon Age the first time round melted away when I realised this. And if you haven’t played the game this way, I recommend you do – you run up against its limitations much less often.

For starters, you’ve actually got a motivation for following the man plot. It was deeply frustrating to go through this specially tailored ‘origin’ story and have it affect the game in only the shallowest of ways – basically having people notice you were a dwarf, or a woman, every now and again, and say “Hello, I see you’re a female dwarf.” Unless you’re roleplaying a generically good person who will save the world just ‘cos it needs savin, if you play any character background OTHER than a human noble you actually have a far greater motivation to do something entirely different – be it fuck off to Orlais because you’re a second class citizen who nearly got raped on her wedding day or raise an army to take back your rightful kingdom from your usurping younger brother. And I know, arguably, you couldn’t do any of those things in the middle of a Blight but you have literally no investment in Ferelden whatsoever. However, as a human, even if you’ve decided you owe nothing to Ferelden (although as a feudal baron you’re probably pretty committed to the notion that you do), you’ve probably got just enough of an inclination to punch Arl Howe repeatedly in the face that you’ll follow the main plot anyway. And my God, does that man need punching.

Equally a lot of the dialogue options you’re given are more usefully fitting to the character as you envision him if you play as a human noble. It’s things like, there’s a bit where Zevran Dudecorset asks you about your Mum, and the dialogue options are basically: “My mother is dead *glare*”, “My mother was a precious jewel” and “Shut the fuck up, Zevran Dudecorset, I’m not talking to you about my mother.” There isn’t, for example, any “I can’t remember my mother because I was sent to the Circle at a young age” for mages or “My mother died young because she was horribly abused by a culture in which my entire race is treated as second classes citizens, as you know ought to know being an elf yourself” for an elf.

These are just a couple of examples, and shallow as they are they do add up, but the notion of a “canon” also touches the game on a deeper level as well. Basically every decision you make in the main plot is essentially situated by its similarity to, or difference from, the canon as Bioware envisioned it. This means that if you do make slightly off the wall decisions (like I did last time) they feel indefinably shallow and unsatisfying. Alistair going off and becoming a wandering, broken drunk makes more contexual sense if you realise it is actually an alternative to him becoming King or sacrificing himself to the Arch Demon. And this is not, I hasten to add, that Bioware consciously have set up their canon as the CORRECT outcome. But because there exists a DEFAULT outcome, what you have is a game narrative in which deviant decisions are always set against an imaginary standard the player cannot access.

Optimal Choices

The other on-going problem I have with Dragon Age are the various ‘moral’ choices presented to the player, most of which have what you might call ‘optimal’ solutions. I really wanted Genericus to be a ruthless, no nonsense sort, embittered from the loss of his family. The first opportunity I actually had to act this – bar being a bit rude in dialogue and giving the King an earful – was when a wounded soldier came crawling out of the Kocari Wilds. I decided to leave him, explaining that we didn’t have time to fanny about bandaging some dude when we had to get darkspawn blood before dark. Again, this would have been an interesting decision if there WAS any actual time pressure, but since you can wander about the Kocari Wilds basically forever if you want to, there was actually no reason at all not to heal the poor fucker. When I insisted we press on, Alistair insisted we stop and because I wasn’t about to get out alpha-maled by Alistair the only possible solution to the power clash the game could offer me was:

“I said we didn’t have time [kill the guy.]”

So I did this. “Psychotic much?” asked Alistair, entirely fairly, hemorrhaging influence.

I wanted to be ruthless, not actively homicidal. Unfortunately the game doesn’t seem able to make this distinction, and I’m getting less and less ruthless the more I play it. I just finished the Dalish plot and I wanted to make a different decision to the one I made last time, except I genuinely couldn’t find a reason NOT to take the negotiation solution.

Basically, you find yourself in a situation which an elf cursed a bunch of humans turning them into werewolves because they raped his daughter and murdered his son. The werewolves, in return, are now attacking the elves and turning them into werewolves – although it should be noted that they this all happened centuries ago so they’re not the rapist/murderer werewolves but their innocent (?) descendents. You can either side with the wolves, side with the elves, or get them released from the curse. The first time round I got them released from the curse, and, the same thing happened this time round. I suppose, perhaps, if you were an elf you might side with the elves because you probably wouldn’t feel too warmly towards humans – especially if you experienced the whole wedding-day-rape plot. And I suppose, alternatively, you might not liked being tricked by Zathrian (the cursing elf), and thus side with the wolves.

Unfortunately one of the difficulties I have being human in Dragon Age is navigating my own racism – I mean if you live in a society basically built on the oppression and degradation of another race you’re, err, you’re going to be a bit racist, aren’t you? And not in a childish “I HATE ELVES” way but in a completely internalized “this is how we do things around” way. I’m trying not to be 21st century about it, and I’ve tread a knife edge of ignorance (“but that’s just the way it is, what do you mean it’s wrong, aren’t they happy in their alienges?!”) while avoiding the openly “But elves are inferior and suck” options.

I was going to side with the wolves against the elves, since the elves had tricked me and were troublesome second class citizens anyway … but I honestly couldn’t do it, especially since you have to ignore the proposed solution (“bring him here so we can talk”) and persuade everyone into a new blatantly psychotic solution (“why don’t we just kill them all instead, mwhahaha”). And at the point when you have the option to do this, the whole story still hasn’t come out, so the only reason to do it is if you feel actively like you want to fuck up a bunch of elves living in a forest for no reaon whatsoever, except perhaps that you don’t like elves. Which was patently untrue because I was boning one.

I did slightly better with Redcliffe this time round as well. In short: the Arl is very ill and his son, who has magical power, has become possessed by a demon. You can either: kill the boy’s mother to fuel a blood magical ritual in order to rescue the kid, go to the Circle of mages and them to perform the same ritual but with lyrium rather than a sacrifice (this is only possible if you have not previously purged the circle, which is also having demonic issues) or kill the kid. Although these decisions are interesting, the best solution is clearly to go the circle. There’s no penalty for running halfway across the world while leaving a possessed kid in command of a castle and you don’t have to sacrifice anybody in order to the do the ritual.

But this time round I just whacked the kid, and felt quite proud of myself for doing so. Oddly enough some people reacted really badly to it (Alistair, for example) which makes no sense whatsoever in the world presented by the game. If you really have a world in which magic and demonic possession are so feared and little understood that they lock people with magical ability up in a tower or turn them in Tranquils (magic-powered zombies) then it really makes no sense to do anything other than kill the child. Furthermore, from the perspective of a Feudal nobleman it makes a degree of sense as well – since his magical ability means is not going to be able to be an acceptable heir, in choosing between the loss of a useless son and an heir-provider, better to kill the son.

(Not that I am generally advocating the murder of children).

To be fair, the Arl took it quite well. Alistair, on the other hand, reacted incredibly badly – almost as if he knew I’d done the wrong thing and there was a better solution lurking out there somewhere.

This is the main problem with the central choices in Dragon Age for me – although perhaps it’s a problem associated with videogame choices in general, but one that just particularly evident in Dragon Age. Supposedly difficult choices are put to you but there is usually a recognised “optimal” path. Although you aren’t explicitly punished for making non-optimal decisions (I was impressed the Arl of Redcliff didn’t bollock me for murdering his son), it is still nevertheless difficult to push yourself into making them. I would like to be able to approach the decisions presented to me in media res, based solely on the knowledge (and also the ignorance) my character has, but although the game presents a setting in which humans are racist and magic is feared the optimal route through the game (save the earl’s son, don’t purge the mages, negotiate peace between werewolves and elves, destroy the golem machine) is very much embedded in the mindset of a 21st century player.

In a world where demons literally exist, possess people and fuck shit up, and where magic users may themselves likely to be possessed by demons, it is genuinely stupid to NOT kill the kid. As somebody who trained as a Templar, you’d think Alistair would recognize this. You’d think the game would also recognize it.

Killing the Arl’s son feels cosmetic more than anything: I knew, and the game knew, and the game told me, that I could save him. But I wanted to be the sort of character who would kill somebody’s son if push came to shove.

To put it a glib way: instead of asking you (as it claims) to make tough decisions, the game asks you make a decision about whether you want to make a tough decision.

This is not all that interesting.

Not Gay If It’s An Elf

The other thing I did this time round was get in a relationship with Zevran Dudecorset. I’d like to say I did this from a position of open-minded acceptance in order to give the character a second chance to win me over, but actually it was a motivated by a childish desire to make his arse hurt.

The truly weird thing is … I have got … almost … fond of him.

He is significantly less annoying if you’re a dude. I don’t know what makes the difference, to be honest, subtle changes to his dialogue perhaps, or the fact he comes across as less of a sexual harassment suit waiting to happen. Essentially, when I was a female character, conversations would go something like this:

Zevran: Perhaps we should have sex now. You know you want to.
Me: Fuck off and die.
Zevran: Ah! I like it when a woman tells me to fuck off and die.

It was sleazy as hell, and the creepy git wouldn’t leave me alone.

For some reason, these days, I find him quite amusing. Between his innuendo and Morrigan’s snarking my party is a continual gigglefest.

I do, however, still struggle with his sexuality. I know the inclusion of same-sex romance options are a big step forward and all that but … but … he’s the lamest bisexual I’ve ever encountered in my life. The thing I like about Leliana is that, even though you can shag her if you’re a dude, she actually seems to have been conceived and written as a lesbian: she’s attracted to women, she had a relationship with a woman previously, most of her conversation options about sex, desire and love are centered around the notion she is mainly attracted to women. There’s even an incidental conversation she has with Zevran about a girl they were both checking out:

Leliana: Zevran, I saw you looking at that girl in town earlier. What did you think of her?
Zevran: My dear Leliana, which girl? I saw many and I watched them all.
Leliana: You know, the one with the… with the shoes!
Zevran: The shoes. Yes, good reference.
Leliana: Well, she also had blond curls worn in a long braid.

And she seems to spend about as much ogling Morrigan’s, errr, assets I do:

Leliana: Maybe we could get you in a nice dress one day. Silk. No, maybe velvet. Velvet is heavier, better to guard against the cold in Ferelden. Dark red velvet, yes. With gold embroidery. It should be cut low in the front of course, we don’t want to hide your features.
Morrigan: Stop looking at my breasts like that. Tis most disturbing!

Zevran, by contrast, despite the fact he’ll sleep with you if you’re a dude and will mention a couple of times that he has slept with men, is actually completely straight. Leliana sleeps with women and is attracted to women. Zevran sleeps with me but gives no indication at any point of actually being attracted to men. All the stories of his conquests involve women. He flirts only with female members of the party. He has an angsty backstory about murdering the love of his life, and lo she is a woman too. It’s not so much that I want him to be talking constantly about bumming dudes, it’s just I think attraction of members of the same sex is a relevant part of being a bisexual. As it is, he’s just this cowardly developmental sop: he’s a straight person you can sleep with as a man, if you’re looking to do so.

And don’t even get me started on the dialogue. As far as I can tell, recognition that you’re a bloke is flagged by the substitution of the word “handsome” for the word “beautiful” – a word of appreciation for male beauty that I think went out with Grandma. What’s really weird about it is that that they carefully edit out gender-neutral expressions of attraction. For example, when you first encounter Zevran, trying to kill you, and he suggests that you spare his life, you get the option to say “You must think I’m royally stupid.” If you’re a woman, he’ll reply “I think you’re royally tough to kill. And utterly gorgeous. Not that you’ll respond to simple flattery. But there are worse things in life than serving the whims of a deadly sex goddess.” Which is one of the many things that made me hate Zevran the first time round, not least because if you DO spare his life it looks like his irritating flattery has played its part in winning you over. And if you’re a dude he’ll say: “I think you’re royally tough to kill. I’m only hoping that you’re stupid. That was a joke. Let me rephrase that. I’m hoping that you’re the sort of fellow that takes a chance every now and again. Ha, ha… No?” Which is genuinely amusing, and was one of the things that made me change my mind about him. I mean why not combine the two, regardless of player gender: “I think you’re royally tough to kill. And utterly gorgeous. I’m only hoping that you’re stupid. That was a joke. Let me rephrase that. I’m hoping that you’re the sort of person that takes a chance every now and again. Ha, ha… No?” Best of all possible worlds – you get the hint that he finds you attractive, and the entertaining bit, without the sleazy “don’t kill me, keep me around as your sextoy” line, which would make any sensible human being kill him there and then. I spent my first game regretting I hadn’t.

It gets even worse when you do attempt to pursue some kind of flirtation / romance with him. The thing is that Zevran is the designated “sexy” character, so he likes it if you flirt with him, and it’s the best way to raise his approval, well that and be all “oh poor you, that’s so awful! *limp wrist*” every time he tells you about his life. I remember raising my eyebrow at the options when I was playing a female character but I guess you could maybe read a touch of self-irony into them. But even the thought of making Genericus say any of them makes me throw up a bit in my mouth. Like there’s a moment when Zevran asks playfully what you intend to do with him having, y’know, got him on your side. And do you want to know what the flirt option is? Brace yourself:

Handsome elf like you? I can think of a few things.

Ye Gods, what an appalling thing to say. I could maybe just about work myself up to saying “I can think of a few things” accompanied by imagined quirking eyebrow but, seriously, “handsome elf like you?” Regardless of whether or not my character sleeps with men, I never at any point signed up to play Graham Norton. Combine this with the fact that only dialogue options to confidences seem to be either “pull yourself together you whiny git” or utterly wet, and the sort of ‘character’ you end up turning yourself into in order to sleep with a man is almost excruciating.

For the record, I managed to stay the strong, silent, cynical type by giving him presents – lots and lots of presents – but, ironically, because the only ways presented of telling Zevran you think he’s hawt are repulsive and because he only ever speaks of attraction to women we are two gay men who are sleeping together but refuse to acknowledge we’re attracted to men. Maybe this is a realistic portrayal of homosexuality in Ferelden, I don’t know, but it feels bloody stupid. I signed up for neither Graham Norton nor self-directed internalized homophobia.

I’m nearly done with Zevran I promise. The other thing I find troublesome about his bisexuality is that sex and exploitation are very much entwined for Zevran. And although perhaps you can appreciate the gender-reversal of having a male character who is very much a sexual victim, it’s still pretty hard to feel comfortable about sleeping with him because of it. To be fair, it might just be me but I’ve never really “got” the assassin/whore trope of fantasy fiction – I mean, first of all do those two professions really go hand-in-hand (a little death with your blowjob, Sir?) and secondly, let’s face, it sleeping with hookers, even ex-hookers, just isn’t … y’know … all that attractive. And certainly not in a world without penicillin. But because Zevran was raised as a whore, and talks only about feeling actual sexual desire for women, and does, in fact, present getting some hot Zevran action as a reason you might consider not killing, it’s hard to get away from the conviction that Zevran sleeps with men now because it’s another tool for survival and in the past because he had to. It also should be noted that he does, in fact, STOP sleeping with you when it thinks he might have feelings for you, which again, further problematises his relationship to sex. I mean, generally, the more I like someone, the more I want to shag them.

In short: Zevran is one messed up little bunny. I have grown rather fond him as a character. But he’s still an appalling bisexual.

Normal WoW service (and short posts!) resume tomorrow.

I’m lagging on my link love as well as my blogging so here goes.

From, like, eighty years ago, a measured and thoughtful post from Harpy’s Nest on that most controversial of topics: healing pets

I heal pets … that is, I heal pets if there’s nothing else I could/should be doing with my mana and GCD, if the pet doesn’t belong to a HUNTARD, in which case the pet is doomed through association. Since raid environments can be pretty frenetic, this actually works out as less healing in practice than I would like it to be, but my heart is there, just not always my attention.

The best thing about this post is the starring role (okay the bit part) of Hopeless the Crab.

He sounds like a friend of Gerald.

The character of the hunter, and the crab, is so perfectly encapsulated by the name that I kind of want to go out now and tame a crab and call it Hopeless…

Another one of Rades’s amazing posts – this time, the story of Gerk.

Failpug of the week (or actually failpug of several weeks ago) award goes to Redbeard (Incidentally, the discussion of this post is almost as interesting as the post itself – specifically readers get themselves caught up the issue of whether players have a moral responsibility to call out tossers on being tossers.)

Moving into the present, the brief squabble over add-ons has been more objectively presented by Miss Medicina and Melfina.

I’m afraid my links are getting incestuous now but since I’ve been, err, what would be the word, experiencing, yes experiencing tanking recently I loved this post over Murloc Parliament. It’s very funny, and very accurate, but I am totally turning into the dude in the first picture. I even have the hat.

While we’re still in blog incest territory, I loved this post on guilds by Alas. She lies, however, when she claims its a wall of text. Or if it is, it’s an extremely accessible and readable one.

The Blog Azeroth topic this week is apparently about what WoW has taught you – and I enjoyed this post over the Lazy Sniper on the subject. It’s actually pretty affirming, when you stop and think about it for a moment, just how much you can get out of a computer game. As well as teh funz of course.

Larisa and Spinks are both talking about cloaks; honestly, the post from Spinks was the only time I’ve felt remotely curious or jealous of Lotro.

You know what the most disappointing cloak in WoW is? I feel this very strongly, I still remember the bitter sting of disappointment I felt when it first fell into my hands one noobish day (my first ever blue). It’s Fenrus’ Hide. A cloak you presumably tear literally from the back of Fenrus the Devourer. This should look awesome right?

Something like this:

(Please note: strange hairy LARPer is not me, or anybody associated with me – he belongs to all of us. I found him on the Internet)

But what does it actually look like?

Errrr, back on track. From a blog I’ve only recently discovered, Altaholics Diary, comes a pretty much spot-on post about the proposed Cataclysm priest changes. Who’d have ever thought holy priests and warlocks would find themselves on the same side but I’m feel about the priest changes exactly the same way Saresa does about the warlock change, to wit:

Thank Goodness They Aren’t Finished Blizzard, Or I’d Have To Walk Right On Over And Punch All Of Your Kittens In The Face.

I mean, Gareth sums it all nicely, and more articulately that my searing irritation can just now, but can I just say a massive WTF?!! It’s really frustrating, as well, that the whole rest of the blogosphere seems to be getting really psyched about the awesome warrior changes and the awesome paladin changes and Saresa and I are stuck in the corner, pulling on our kitten punching gloves.

Basically Blizzard seem to be buffing all the spells with “lol” in the name. Lolwell. Lolynova. I think Blizzard have basically gone and painted themselves into a corner with holy priests because all other healing classes, I think, were designed essentially as NOT A HOLY PRIEST: so druids have HoTs, shaman have their chain heal and their earthshield and their riptide, paladins are all about the single target bomb healing, disc priests are damage mitigation. And holy priests are just … like … healers. Right down to the fact they seem to want our main spell to be “Heal.” Oh thanks, Blizzard, that’s inspiring. I mean I know flash heal isn’t exactly falling over itself with wit and imagination but the ‘flash’ gives it slightly more panache. I presume they’re also going to re-name smite “Damage.” And Renew “Small Pointless HoT.”

Holy priests kind of have a place now as burst healers, and there’s quite a lot of flexibility in the serendipity-model. You know, you get off a CoH and a PoM, then three single target heals, then you’ve got a speedy PoH for more AoE or a speedy greater heal for an random single target emergency (not that I really use this much but it’s nice to have the option). And then CoH is off cooldown again. But now it’s like they’re trying to make holy priests the flexible healer by taking away our flexibility. I mean who wants to be hemmed into a model of casting one spell three times in a row to get a slightly better version of the same spell the next time you cast it. I remember all the blue stuff about holy priests being too dependent on spamming a single button, when, actually we’re not at all. And now they’re actually building a mechanic into the game that encourages us to spam a single button. GREAT!!!

I hate all the weird lolwell / lolynova crap as well. Of course perhaps Blizzards are going to build their encounters differently but currently I can’t think of a single encounter in which either of those spells would be overwhelmingly more useful than anything less stupid.

I know they have a bee in their bonnet about “changing the way healing works” or whatever but, call me hidebound, I rather like the bar-go-down-bar-go-up model. Yes it doesn’t sound exciting but it excites me. That’s because, Blizzard, I like healing. Which is why I’m a fucking healer. And currently looking at the prominence given to lolynova and lolwell it seems as though they’re changing the way healing works to make it really annoying for DPS.

When somebody takes damage, unless they’re being a tit, I want to stand at the back in my sissy robe and heal them off that damage while they continue what they’re doing: which is hopefully sticking stabby things in a bad guy. I don’t expect them to interrupt their rotation and run halfway across the raid to get a cup of a tea an biscuit from a goddamn lolwell.

Finally, Happy Blogiversary to HoTs & DoTs whose awesomeness cannot be articulated without making this sentence far too long.

And a sad farewell to that grumpy bugger, Dwism, who has gone fishin….

Edit: Holy shit, it’s not Friday. My expression is now like this:

I favour “Blackrock and Roll” or “Between Blackrock and a Hard Place”.

So yeah.

A couple of days ago Tam and I (along with a few other members of SAN-EU) put together a run to Blackrock Depths. We’d been a couple of times before, but had never really got past the first level, and none of us had managed to pick up the Shadowforge Key, which meant that it was the first time either of us had tangled with Dagran Thassurian.

It was … strange. And a little bit sad.

A while back on my post about talents, I complained about not having access to top-tier abilities until level seventy.

Thinking about it, I’m not sure it’s such a bad thing after all.

A group of five players, in the low to mid fifties, some but not all kitted out in heirlooms make absolute mincemeat of Blackrock Depths. Even without top-tier talents, we managed to take most of the dwarf patrols two at a time, grinding them into a smooshy beardy paste. Will I be sad if my Shaman has her Riptide taken away, yeah probably to be honest, but it’s not like I’ll be unable to heal in Outland.

Going through Blackrock Depths, two things struck me.

The first was that I was really sad that none of the new instances had that sense of scale, of genuine place. Time and again I asked myself “why wasn’t Azjol Nerub like this”? Hell, the place has more bosses than Icecrown Citadel.

The second thing that struck me was: “Holy Crap, I’m glad I don’t have to farm this place for emblems”.

Running Blackrock Depths I could forget, for a moment, that I was playing World of Warcraft, and feel like I was playing Dungeons and Dragons. It felt like a real place that I’d gone into with real people to fight a real enemy, one who had specific goals and plans, and who would stay dead once I killed him.

It was awesome, but it just isn’t how WoW works.

The first time you kill a boss, you want it to be epic. You want a titanic struggle against adversity. You want quests and lore and integration into the world. You want to say “this, this is the person who killed my favourite NPC, this is the person who led the armies that razed the starting-level village to the ground. This person must be pooned and pooned hard.”

The second and subsequent times you kill a boss, you want it over as fast and as painlessly as possible.

The problem with WoW is that it isn’t sustainable as a Baldur’s Gate style game. You can’t treat leveling as the saga of one Orc’s rise from obscurity to triumph, because the game constantly reminds you that you’re just one player amongst millions, and gives you repetitive tasks that you have to do repeatedly. At endgame it’s even worse. You do the same dungeons, fight the same bosses, run the same quests over and over again until the next patch gets released. Raid content is designed on the assumption that you’ll do the first part at least a couple of time before starting on the second part.

Blackrock Depths is tragic because it’s the dying gasp of a doomed philosophy. It was an attempt to build a dungeon that felt like a real place, when the whole purpose of a dungeon in WoW is to be an endlessly respawning themepark full of colourful monsters who drop shiny loot.

I vaguely wonder if things could have been different. If we could have kept these vast, sprawling follies of dungeons. But I suspect that the answer is “no”.