I can relate. A guildmate invited me on a dungeon “Black Rock depths” I think it was called. Without asking I could tell I was 20 years older than the others. I doubt I’ll be invited back…not because of any rudeness or anything but because these guys zipped through this place so fast I barely had a chance to do more than watch. I was told to put my pet on passive, so by the time I targeted something and sent him in, the target was dead. I tried tab=target but I ended up aggroing more foes.
It annoyed the others, but they were nice about it. I told my guildmate that its probably best if I just go solo, since I’ve never done a lot of dungeons. If a group is going to run through at top speed (these guys obviously have done this before several times. They knew exactly where things were, etc) its not that much fun for me. I haven’t done it, so I’d prefer to take it at a slower pace.
There is one guy I have teamed with before, but since the last time we teamed I’ve gained 13 levels on him. He asked me to run him through the scarlet monastery last night but I couldn’t. I wanted to finish up my own quest and by the time I’d be “open” it would be time to go to bed for me.
Maybe I’m not old old, but I’m old enough that I need to sleep at a reasonable time in order to work the next day.
Dialogue yesterday (I’ve been in a new guild for a while but haven’t opened up in Ventrilo yet), after our off-guild tank refered to me repeatedly as “babe,” a nomenclature not usually reserved for dwarves (even female dwarves):
Female draenei mage: “… are you a girl?”
Me: “last time I peed I was, yes.”
Pause.
Mage: “I sit down, too.”
Male draenei DK: “me three.”
The bear who’d been babeing me: “cool, I’m surrounded by three chicks and a tree!”
The male tree is a girl too. The bear isn’t.
I’ve been in raids with those three other guildies before, not a single one of us ever opens her mouth on Ventrilo. Raids have come down crashing because the raid leader was raving about my “sexy Spanish accent” while I blushed furiously and thought “dude, you’re half my age, STOP THIS!”
I’m in a pretty-laid back guild that has a split of age 30+, either gender, typically married/in committed relationships players (whose spouses usually are WoW players and fellow guild members too), and the young-20s and younger, typically male players. I think the youngest member is 13 or 14. So even the “omg a real girl!!!1” types typically cool it after a while - not the least because usually the “girl’s” partner is a fellow guildie. I’ve been in all-real-female groups often enough - we use Ventrilo for most instances, and it’s required on raids. (Well, required for everyone but a deaf guildie; he’s a stellar player and I’m a fast typist, so typically we pause while I transcribe any complicated stuff, otherwise he’s fine.)
Jolly Roger - for your targeting issues, I recommend targeting your tank and then using the Assist Key to acquire a target. (I don’t know what the default is; mine’s “[” and I think I remapped it to that.) You can do a quick Ctrl-1 to sic your pet, or create a macro to fire off your pet at what you’re shooting at while otherwise keeping it on Passive.
As a slowly-learning hunter I’ll second this suggestion heartily. I’ve found it actually works even better to set your tank as your “focus” before you start (using “/focus <name>” or “/focus target”). Then you have a macro that goes something like this:
/target focustarget
/cast Hunter’s Mark
/petattack
This should target whatever the focus (your tank) is targetting, cast Hunter’s Mark on it, and send your pet in to attack. Then you start mashing whatever shots you want to use (for me it’s Serpent Sting followed by Steady Shot/Arcane shot - this probably has to be reworked now that Steady Shot got nerfed). Now, if your pet is going to off-tank or something then you’ll want something else (probably the same macro without the first line), but for strict tank-assist this seems to work well. Sometimes you’ll get an error if the tank doesn’t have a target (and you can add some lines to the macro to supress that, but I don’t recall them off the top of my head). You also want to make sure the tank has built up some threat before you call this.
You can also use this macro while soloing but you have to acquire the target manually (since you won’t have a focus). Another command that comes in handy when soloing is “/petassist”. If you have your pet on defensive and it’s tanking multiple mobs it’s nice to know you’re shooting at whatever the pet is targeting - this keeps you from accidentally pulling aggro. Put this in a macro with your opening shot (or Hunter’s Mark) and you have a starting point.
Ha. My City of Heroes supergroup (guild) has an Australian girl with a drop-dead awesome accent, and she loves the attention so far as I know. Course, for the most part that’s an older group, and we all get along fine aside from teasing. Hell, she’s among the most foul-mouthed of us.
It’s an interesting SG, really. A significant number of players are women, but they’re all spoken for, usually by other SG members. I think there’s more couples than single members. There’s less flirting that goes on than you might think.
Standup comedian I heard years ago, talking about his wife:
(paraphrasing)
“My wife has terrible timing. The score is tied, the ball’s in the air, the buzzer’s sounding … and she’ll step in front of the screen and ask, ‘Honey, what are you thinking?’ … ‘Plotting your violent death, my pet.’ Oh, I love my wife, but I have to admit that I have thought of ways to kill her. Of course, I know I’d never get away with it. ‘Mr. Smith, how do you explain the fact that we found your wife stuffed into a 55-gallon drum floating half a mile out to sea?’ ‘Wow, I don’t know how she paddled out that far. I guess that’s when she panicked and dismembered herself!’”
Yeah - we have a policy that guild chat has to be kept in check until 10 PM Server time - but Ventrillo is kind of no-holds barred - so we get pretty foul-mouthed on there. I’m mostly just a flirt and have been hanging out with most of my guildies for 4+ years, but the noobies always take some training.
We had to set up a PG-13 channel for when someone’s kids come on our V. Otherwise, we don’t let anyone under 18 on it unles we are doing an instance or a raid.
What gets really interesting is when we’re doing an instance on Vent and one of the guys in the guild starts hitting on my daughter. I’ll usually ask a question about her son just to shut them up.
I have a priest/herbalist named FatherThyme, so half the guild calls me Father or Pops. They don’t necessarily connect that two of the other active players are my kids just because my kids call me Dad.
New features aren’t always intuitive. You can access a bunch of the stuff that came out around the same time as the last expansion even if you haven’t purchased it, but in short…
If you don’t have Burning Crusade, you’re capped at level 60, can’t go to Outland, and can’t play Dranei or Blood Elves.
If you don’t have have Burning Crusade but don’t have Wrath of the Lich King, you’re capped at level 70, can’t go to Northrend, and can’t play Death Knights.
Yes, yes it is. You have denied yourself the joys of having me throw cucumbers at you in green type, or found out why whenever there are eggs in an instance, someone yells, “Hey Mel! Watch out!”
for pete’s sake, it was one time - just one time - and I swear, I didn’t aggro the eggs - I was pushed!
In a couple of the guilds I’ve been in, it’s mostly been the kids that are the foul-mouthed ones – they just don’t seem to have the maturity to know when it’s appropriate and when it’s not. We’ve booted a few over time because they couldn’t control their mouths.
I’ve been playing for almost three years now with total play time well over 1,000 hours. I’ve never been in a raid or about half the five-man instances, never visited a battleground or arena, never played on a PVP or RP server, never played a Horde over level 30 (except my new death knight), didn’t take up cooking until last summer, and never tried fishing until this month. I had two toons ready for Northrend when I got the expansion (on release day), and still haven’t hit 75 on either one. Never tried engineering, alchemy, or inscription, and never gone above 150 skill on blacksmithing or leatherworking. Haven’t played a dranei, and only did the starting area on blood elves, orcs, and undead. Never played a warlock, hunter, or warrior over level 30; a druid or shaman over 20. Never played a paladin at all. Never tried respeccing my shadow priest or my frost mage. There are still whole zones I’ve never visited.
One of the things I love most about this game is that there’s just so much to do and so much to see. It never seems to get old.
I think we can blame the “hip-hop” influence. I work with a lot of late-teens and 20-somethings at my job, and it just seems to me that profanity is a part of their everyday vocabulary in a way it wasn’t for my peers when I was that age. Then add in things like UFC, and you’ve got all the young males for whom it’s de rigeur to constantly be “badass”. At my job the other chefs and I are all over 40 (the other two are actually over 50), while the youngsters are all on the serving staff, and more than once we’ve wished for a soundproof wall between our space and theirs so we wouldn’t have to listen to their non-stop cussing and bragging.
I’ve never been on a raid (but then my highest toon is only lvl 41 and I’ve only been playing a little over a month). I rarely accept group invitations, so I soloed Shadowfang Keep and Deadmines with my paladin. Of course, to do that I had to wait until she was lvl 34 (those instances are lvl 22), so I got no XP whatsoever from them and most of the loot was useless to me. I only did SFK to obtain Jordan’s Smithing Hammer for the pally quest, and did Deadmines just to get that danged Defias quest chain over with since it had been sitting in my quest log for 14 levels. I put most of the SFK loot on the AH and disenchanted what didn’t sell (most of it), and disenchanted just about everything I found in DM.
Plus you get numbnuts who insist that the mature in “being mature” and mature in “mature language” are exactly alike, and that being mature means cussing up a storm. God knows I’ve dealt with enough of those idiots.
I just bought the game, and I apologize if this has been asked unto exhaustion before (which it probably has), but are there any specific classes that are always, or almost always, in demand? I enjoy tanking, support, and DPSs, and so I’ve been hoping to start with a character who’ll be easy to find groups with when there aren’t enough guild members around to play with.
I know it probably won’t be an issue until I’m considerably more experienced, but in reading wowwiki and other sources, people seem to feel that Shamans and Druids are more useful than Priests as high-level healers, since they’re more versatile… is there any truth to that? I don’t want to wake up in 30 levels to find that my friends are the only ones who want to group with me…
So what Addons do the rest of you experienced dopers use? I find the main interface somewhat limiting, especially when playing the priest I’m trying to level up (is it that hard to make it so my priest bubble automatically targets me?), and I honestly don’t know what addons are the most useful for managing an admittedly shadow priest who will probably later switch to holy or for a druid.
You can change a setting in the options (in Interface, I think) to make the game presume you’re targeting yourself if you have nobody selected and you’re a viable target for the spell. So instead of it turning to a blue-outlined hand, it just casts on yourself. Don’t know which option offhand, though.
As for healers, one of the best addons I can think of offhand is Omen3, as it’ll give you a good graph of threat generated, so you can manage how much damage/healing you’re doing and make it less likely for the mob to jump on you.
You don’t need an addon to auto self cast. Hit Escape, Interface, select Combat on the left, and check the box for auto self cast. Click okay, and that’s it. There are lots of settings there that you can personalize under the various headings to the left.
Also, the default key for assist is “f”. Hitting “v” will make a health bar appear over the mobs’ heads, which makes it much easier to click target them.
Course, for the most part that’s an older group, and we all get along fine aside from teasing. Hell, she’s among the most foul-mouthed of us.
