SFG, you didn’t happen to join my guild over in Alex, didja? Someone of the female persuasion joined last week, and she was really friendly. Or if it was you, you’d tell me, right?
Thanks
Q
PS: I haven’t been able to play lately due to Pinkeye infection. Hurts to focus on the screen, but I’ll be playing for a little while tonight.
Very cool! Keeping fingers crossed.
I checked back with him, and I did get it wrong – he said missed. He also covered me (and you by extension) in <3 for pointing out the glyph.
I see what you did there, missy. 
Plus, this thread is also about self-selection bias. 
Out of curiosity, Tom, what do you consider a hardcore raider?
That said, I’ve been hauled into arena. :eek:
So, a tauren, a troll, a belf, and a dinosaur walk into a bar…
We had our first night with a 3v3 comp (enh shaman/bm hunter/holy pally) and went 2-11 for various reasons (dcs, gear imbalance, healbot going pear shaped, etc). It’s definitely a very different environment from even bgs, and I can see why class balance between pvp/pve is so difficult to do well. I know I’m suddenly paying much more attention to the breakdown and timing of my bag of tricks. Either way, the three of us are going to be practicing a lot to get used to working as a team.
And I also got two of the Hard Knocks achievements down, so the only one left is Arathi Basin. Which I’ll be able to do… if I ever get in. The AB queues in my battlegroup are *insane *this week what with the influx/outflux of the pve’ers/pvp’ers. Once that’s done, I only need UP and then that hot pink drake is ALL MINE.
Anyone who raids a lot more than I do, of course. 
As a reasonable benchmark, let’s say (at this current moment) anyone who’s taken down Professor Putricide.
And I do think there are more women than men posting to this thread who qualify - SFG, Ferret, you, winterhawk - on the male side of the ledger we have maybe Daedalus (not sure of the gender there) and maybe Skammer (don’t remember if he’s beaten Putricide yet). I don’t remember if aruqvan is a WoW raider or just an obsessive EVE player. The artist known as Jagaya in BDL is male, I think, and a raider, but he doesn’t really post all that much to this thread.
Psh, she was friendly, and that made you think it was me? Nope, it wasn’t. (I’d tell ya if it were me.)
Hope the eye gets better soon. 
I’ve luckily always avoided pinkeye, but since she works at a university my mom tends to get it once every few years, and it never looks like fun.
By that metric, I guess, yeah. I was thinking more historically–over the past year or so, I’d say, we’ve had about the same number of male and female hardcore raiders contributing. But at the moment, the guys are at least quieter, if not inactive.
Hey, I’m even boycotting raiding currently so I don’t think I qualify as anything resembling hardcore. 
I’ll admit I’ve been thinking about it, though, after my husband was (rightfully) complaining about the performance of one of the other healers in ICC last night and asking WTF she was actually doing, after checking the logs.
I was a hardcore raider for a lot of my Ever[del]Crack[/del]Quest playing days, though, including being in one of the top two guilds on our server (with constant competition between the two) and having a raid officer who would yell and swear at the group if we screwed it up. I don’t need stress from a game these days, so I’m sorry if my guild could use me. A game isn’t worth me getting poor sleep, etc.
Ha, I wouldn’t count myself as a hardcore raider at all. I consider myself lucky when I get into a PUG, and I haven’t been in a group yet to take down Rotface much less Putricide.
I did pick up three achievements yesterday: Volunteer Work; Wooly Mammoth; and Explore Winterspring. I’m trying to catch up to Yeticalya!
Also, with my pally I tanked our weekly guild dungeon run: Steamvault. We wiped twice on trash (one from being feared into another group; once from a pat). But then we got in the habit of Repenting one of the casters in each pull and it wasn’t too hard - I found it pretty easy to hold aggro for some reason.
We also wiped on the boss that does the AoE lighting spells, because we had to learn the hard way to avoid them. Second attempt went smoothly, and none of the other bosses gave us trouble.
One moment where I got peeved: we had four guildies and a hunter pug who went through the whole instance with us, but he fell in the water after the second-to-last boss. I think he had trouble getting out and then he disconnected, so after a few minutes we kicked him and queued for another dps. While waiting we 4-manned the trash leading up to the final boss.
Just as we’re discussing strat for the boss fight, we’re joined by a warrior. He needs a minute to switch out of his tanking spec into dps. Then the five of us take down the final boss without any problem. A very ice tanking cloak (Devilshark Cape) drops; I need; the warrior needs and wins it.
I was kind of put out that he needed on tank gear for a fight he wasn’t tanking, on top of the fact that it was the only fight he participated in in the whole dungeon. I didn’t say anything but I was kind of pissed, although the others said I shouldn’t have been. Looking at it more calmly, I couldn’t have used it until 70 (I’m 68 now) and by then I may have something better, but still I was a little ticked.
Good luck! At least it’s still same-server, seeing as I made an expensive choice last night.
I’m of two minds about this situation. On the one hand, it’s usually considered good etiquette if you’re rolling on gear of a different spec than you’re currently in to ask first (or announce at the beginning of the run that you’re rolling on offspec gear as main spec, so the group can have the chance to kick you or ask you not to), but on the other hand, it kind of annoys me when people get upset about it, especially when DPS are rolling on tank gear. Tanking is a catch-22, otherwise: you can’t tank effectively without good gear (far more than is true for DPS, since an undergeared DPS can be carried by a good team, but it’s a lot harder to carry an undergeared tank), but you can’t get good gear unless you run the instances that drop it. So many new aspiring tanks (including me) will run heroics as DPS until they’ve gotten sufficient gear to switch over. I do always ask first, though, and usually confine myself to rolling Need on any tank gear that the current tank doesn’t want.
It’s not uncommon at all (in fact it seems to be the rule rather than the exception on my server) to see at least three and sometimes as many as five warriors and paladins running normal Halls of Reflection as offspec for a shot at the elusive tanking shield (which is the best one you can get outside of raids). Everybody pretty much just accepts it.
Heh, I post from time-to-time, but not as much as some of our more prolific posters.
And yes, I’m male.
I don’t think I’d set Putricide as the cut-off for “hardcore”, but if you want then I qualify I suppose. Judging by the general WoW boards, if you claimed to be hard core and hadn’t, at a bare minimum, beaten the LK on 10-man normal mode you would be pretty much laughed at. I’d say a more accurate “hardcore” definition would be somewhere in the middle of hard modes on 10-man and working on the LK in 25s (and in fact, most “hardcore” guilds would have LK down on 25s too - we just kinda suck at that fight).
I think in general the other definition works better - “Hard-core is anyone that raids more than I do. Casual is anyone who raids less”.
I’m a hard-core non-raider
Yesterday, while doing the Dalaran cooking daily (Sewer Stew), I ran across this bit of weirdness:
http://www.mister-rik.com/hosted/sewer_frog.jpg
Yup, little Sewer Frog on the ground way down below Dalaran. Don’t know how it got there - all I can figure is that it somehow got into that tunnel that empties out of the sewer and fell all the way down.
One of those, “Shattering the Crystals” or some name like that, I have no idea why it’s listed as a group quest (5-man, even). All I had to do was find the crystals, whack the 4-6 non-elite lvl 80 mobs surrounding each one, and then shatter the crystals. Sure, there are lvl 80+ elite patrols wandering around, but they move so slowly that they’re painfully easy to avoid. Afterwards I wondered why I had waited so long to do that one. I’d 2-manned all the others some time ago - and they were considerably more difficult, because you actually had to kill the lvl 80+ elites. Though, granted, my GearScore (per the addon) at the time was sub-2000, not the 5000+ it is now. OTOH, Shattering the Crystals is the only one that didn’t convert to a daily quest after I completed it, which bummed me out. I was doing it and thinking, “Damn, this is easy! I’m gonna do it every day!” Well, I guess I won’t
Well I don’t pew-pew! I hack and slash with my big axe! My mage is getting close to starting running dungeons, though. I think the change from soloing to dungeons is going to be much bigger for her than it was for my paladin. Solo, most of what she does is single-target stuff, and very little in the way of AoE (I learned a long time ago that AoE when you’re soloing is bad - it makes everything run straight at me all at the same time, and out from under whatever AoE spell I just cast, since I don’t have a tank to keep the mobs in my AoE. But as I understand it, dungeon-running calls for a lot more AoE. I suppose it would be smart for me to get practice in on the “Normal” versions first
I died in AN the other day and was going to wait for a rez until I noticed that the other person who died was the healer. Since she and I were the only ones in the group capable of rezzing, I released and she and I ran back together.
BTW, SFG, I’m looking forward to the RDF putting us together one of these days!
Yesterday I spent most of the day working on trying to get my mage to lvl 77 (got to 95% of the way from 76 to 77 before I was just too tired and had to log and go to bed. Grr.) I only logged my paladin in long enough to run one random heroic for my Frosts … but I topped the Recount DPS meter for the first time, with something like 3200 DPS.
I ran into a situation in Alterac Valley (probably my least favorite BG) a while back - I got killed and rezzed at the GY closest to the Alliance base, and the bulk of the fighting all happened to be right there in front of the GY. There were so many players there, and so many different spell effects going off, that my computer completely bogged down and I could hardly move to get out of the GY and rejoin the fight.
I’m really really hoping that Cataclysm manages to split people into hanging out in the capitals. I’m getting so tired of continually running face-first into walls in Dalaran because the graphics are lagging so bad there. And I’ve got a 2.4GHz processor, 4GB of RAM, and a 128MB ATI Radeon HD 2400 video card.
I really haven’t been following the Cataclysm previews; are they adding any new cities? Dal may remain the most popular hang-out spot just because it’s so convenient to get almost anywhere else.
No new cities. I thought Deepholm was going to be the new city, but it’s just the new quest hub. They intend to put the focus back on the factional cities, Stormwind, Orgrimmar, and the rest. Makes sense; BC and LK were primarily about the Alliance and Horde ‘putting aside their differences’ to face larger threats, so they got shared cities. Cataclysm is putting an emphasis back on Alliance vs Horde, so they’re going to encourage splitting up the two factions.
As long as they put portals to the other cities in Stormwind or Ironforge, I’ll be happy. Otherwise I suspect everyone will still hearth in Dalaran just for travel purposes.
This. (And Org or Undercity on the Horde side). Honestly, I’d like every city to have a set of portals, or at least a portal to the main capital. I park my bank alt in Thunder Bluff because there’s so much less traffic there; it would be nice if there were several more-or-less interchangeable places to park.
My two cents, as a main-spec tank:
Any hybrid may roll mainspec on one spec. By default, that is the spec for the role they are currently filling. If they would like to mainspec roll on another spec (e.g., a Prot War who wants to roll on DPS gear, or a Fury War who wants to roll on tanking), it is *their job *to inform the group that that’s what they’ll be doing and get a thumbs-up from the people whose gear they’d be encroaching on. If the group says no, they may then politely bow out.
So, it would have been fine for the DPS Warrior to roll on the cloak… *if *he’d told you he was there for tanking gear and gotten your thumbs-up first. Because he didn’t, IMO, that makes him a greedy ass.
I saw that! Joe dropped a line on a Facebook thread. Man, I suppose this means I have to actually bring you along for Heroics, huh?
And we’ll all run together / To pick wild mountain Icethorn / All around the bloomin’ Lichbloom / Will ye release-and-run-back, lassie, release-and-run-back
I’m very sad I’ve never run into people I’ve known from other servers. One of my alts is in the same battlegroup as Cairne, but he’s the wrong faction to hit anybody from BDL.
From what I hear, it was just as bad in vanilla. Of course, that was when each faction only had one AH, but still.
Yeah, but first I’ll have to get geared up. I’m thinking about dropping Ret and going Prot/Holy once I have some decent gear, so you don’t have to carry me all the way and can instead bitch about my tanking. 
Oh, whatever. What’s the point of being friends with people who play obscenely overgeared characters if they can’t drag you through Heroics?
It’s one thing to go into a random undergeared (where potentially you could end up with four more people like you and then everyone’s fucked); it’s another thing entirely when the people doing the carrying know what they’re getting in for.
True dat. And with the way you guys are geared I think I’d have a hard time holding aggro anyway. 
Carry away!
Ah yeah, forgot about the battlegroup thing. Well, my main is Alliance on Lightbringer, Whirlwind battlegroup.
I very rarely get put in a random group with anyone from Cairne – and I’m on Cairne. It’s kind of strange.
Yup, I don’t think I have anybody in Whirlwind. Oh well, maybe someday!
Actually, I notice that with all of my characters. It’s much more likely that I get grouped with people from other servers. (When you figure how many servers make up a battlegroup, that’s not terribly surprising.)