I had a dream...

I had a dream that we would be able to clear Kara. I had a dream that come WotLK we would be able to enjoy the 10-man raids.

After weeks and weeks of struggling getting a second raid night going, I am now consigned to admit defeat. Our guild will never clear Kara before the expansion, which makes me very sad. We are a small, social guild and no one ever expected us to be able to do 25-mans - all I wished for was to be able to clear Kara. Not a big thing you might think, but you need more than 3 hours to do it (at least at our gear/experience level).

We always field a team on Tuesdays and sometimes we might even be oversubscribed by a whole person - one record week we even had 2 reserves. We have a few people that always sign up for our attempted 2nd raid night (we have tried pretty much every night of the week now), but we have never been close to filling it. With that in mind I can't see that we can recruit - the only person whom I can imagine being tempted by this state of affairs is exactly the person we wouldn't want. The person who will run with us on the parts of Kara we have on farm and get most of any suitable gear that drops as few of us have anything we want from in there by now - and then promptly leave for a guild that raids.

Have I thought about changing guilds? Of course I have - a million times and more. My problem is that most guilds that raid seem do so more than I would be able to. I would love to raid twice a week - and I might be able to do 3 times some weeks - but the minimum seems to be 4 times per week and that is not an option for me.

There is also the fact that the social side is important to me when I play. When I am not in a raid (or farming mats/gold) I like pottling about on one of my alts. If guild chat is mostly dead or people are not fun to be online with - then that would not work for me.

As you can probably tell I am feeling quite down about the whole thing. Just the thought of leaving my guild feels wrong, but after having tried for so long with no traction for raiding a bit more or getting the social side more active, I just don't know what to do.

I'm so excited...

Awesome news, my friends - PlusHeal.com is here!

It is a forum for all healers, read more about it at World of Matticus and ChickGM.

Why, you might ask, am I so excited about a generic healing forum? Wouldn't I rather have something like HolyPriest.com? The answer is a resounding no! I owe all that I know about healing as a holy priest to the fabulous priest bloggers out there (thank you guys, you are amazing), I don't need a forum for that. It is easy to learn to be a good healer as a priest/druid/shaman/paladin through all the fabulous blogs out there, but what happens when you graduate from 5-mans to raids? Even if it is just 2-healering Kara you are no longer healer HolyPaladin and healer RestoShaman - you are the healing TEAM. You can smooth out each other's weaknesses, build on each other's strengths and together be a team that is greater than the sum of its parts. It can be a thing of beauty.

And this is the awesomeness of PlusHeal.com. Not only can you find people to explain and debate specific class issues, but also people to debate the best way for a druid and a priest to heal together.

This is healers not divided by class, but joined by role - the concept of the healing team extending beyond servers, realms and continents to create a community of people passionate about the role that they enjoy.

Big thanks to the founders of PlusHeal.com - Matt, Auzara, Wynthea, Lume, Anna, Pat and Siha - for creating a place for healers to discuss their craft.

Haelz FTW!

Blog roll fun

I was just in the middle of updating my blog roll when I feel in love with Automagica's blog roll set-up. Not only does it space the names out and put little icons in front of those blogs that have one - it also gives the title of the latest post AND it tells you how long ago that post was made.

How awesome is that!!

I then realised that it is a new feature available on Blogger, so off I went to include it on my very own little page. I wasn't particularly looking forward to the inputting of all the blogs into the little widget, but was very excited about how lovely it would look once it was done.

So I added the widget and opened it up - and it asked me very politely if I would like to import any of my Google Reader blogs? Well - doh! So I could just go tick, tick, tick on all the blogs I subscribe to and whammo they were on my fabulous new blog widget.

This is so exciting! Makes me almost feel like a proper blogger... :-)

The choices we make

I am currently working my way through the archives over at Mana Battery Bitch, soaking up info that will help me as I level my shadowpriest. The other day I came across this post about how she'd come to choose the class/race combos of her characters.

It reminded me of an article I read somewhere with a very interesting theory on people's choices for their character's looks. Unfortunately, I cannot remember where I read it. However, as far as I remember the theory says that people broadly fall into one out of two camps on this issue.

Camp 1 are people who view the character merely as a means of playing the game. They might not care what it looks like or make choices based on what they want to look at while playing.

Camp 2 views the character as a representation of themselves in the gameworld. These people are likely to either want to create a character that they can feel a connection to or that they feel represents them well to others in game.

Personally I am very firmly in camp 2. The character needs to feel right or I will never get into playing it. My husband on the other hand is more of a camp 1 person. He has been known to use the randomize function and two of his main characters are female. I've tried playing a male character a few times, but it just feels off - like a piece of clothing that's the wrong fit. And every time I play together with one of my husband's female characters it still feels weird.

This is the same reason that I have stuck with humans and night elves over dwarves and gnomes - the fit is somehow not right. I've yet to try to play a draenai seriously, but I must admit that the few times I've dabbled on Azuremyst Isle the tail thing was a bit freaky. Also, the legs bending the wrong way. And the run - they look very odd when they run - particularly with the tail.

Did I mention the tail?

Naming is the other thing that is very important to me when creating a character. I'll never understand how someone can find the will to level "Ipwnyou" or "Fruitfudge" to level 70.

I slightly unintentionally ended up with a bit of a theme for my characters. A couple of my first experimental characters ended up with Swedish girls names, the kind that I imagine have been around since the Viking times almost (with some artistic license on the spelling side) and it worked well so I stuck with it. Hence Yrsa, Tufva, Alfva. With my druid I tried for something different and went for Moonclaw, but in the end it got changed to Ylfva. Moonclaw just wasn't me.

I am considering creating a warlock and I already know what it will look like. Both my human priests have the same face, but with different hair. Tufva is holy so she has white hair and Alfva is shadow so she has black hair. I'm thinking a warlock should have long, swishy blonde hair - just because you dabble in the dark arts doesn't mean you can't look good while doing it. I'm still working on finding a good name for her, so it might be awhile before she appears.