New Beta Invites Sent Out

When I saw the announcement of the new beta invites going out of course there was some hope that maybe I would get one.  It would surely put my new toy, wildstar, in the backseat if I did get one.  While reading over the post on MMO-C that basically went like "woohoo I got in" and "still no beta for me" they seemed to come to some sort of an idea about who these new invites might be aimed at.

After the first few pages it became clear that everyone that was getting the invite seemed to be 14/14 heroic and those that did not were not.  Of course there were a few people who immediately decided to complain about how "it is unfair to give it to only the top players".

I wish to disagree.  There are some very good reasons to give the beta to people that are 14/14 heroic and the first and foremost one is that maybe they plan to release the raids for testing.  Like it or not the people that are 14/14 heroic and have been so for some time are the best raiders and as such as the best people to be around to test it, don't you think?  So how exactly is that unfair.

If you want to test something wouldn't it make the most sense to have the people testing it that have the most invested in it.  These are the people that will bust their asses and raid 20 hours a week when content comes out to try an get it done as fast as possible.  These are the people who have been doing the heroic raids and know what works and what doesn't.  These are the people that will, and do, take advantage of every bug they can get control over to get the quicker kill.  These are the people that will find those bugs they can abuse or think of strategies that the developers never thought of just so they can down the boss.  I don't care what anyone says, but if I wanted to have someone test my raiding design I would want it to be the people that know about raiding most and those people would be the people that have cleared all current raids.

Add to that the fact that it is quite possible that many of these 14/14 heroic raiders are bored off their asses now.  Many of the people saying they got invites said that they were unsubscribed and had been for a long time.  This is also a smart move on blizzards part to invite these people.  Not only are they valuable testers if they are going to start some raid testing soon but they are people that are getting antsy with the game, even more than people like you and I, and you know we are about as sick of SoO as can be.

So sending these people invites gets them interested again in the game and as long as they are interested in the game they will be playing it and not looking at other options, like I have been looking at wildstar myself.  Leveling three characters now, and even if I like it, I am not doing so because I want to but more so because there is nothing worth doing in warcraft.

Anything that blizzard can do to stop some of the bleeding, like sending all those hardcore players invites so they can get into beta instead of maybe, just maybe, getting caught up in the hardcore design of wildstar where they could very well loose these people too thanks to the lack of content, would be a good thing for the game.

But even for those people that are not 14/14 heroic and have not received an invite.  Don't be jealous over the fact someone else got an invite and you didn't, be happy that they are inviting raiders with the intention of having them do raid testing.  Why?  Because when raid testing starts that means the expansion is that much closer, because that is usually the biggest thing to test and it is usually the last thing to test.  If they are really trying to get all these raiders in by the 27th and maybe when they open raid testing on the 27th, it could be a sign, a very good sign, that we are getting closer to the tail end of the long wait between expansion and we might be seeing a solid release date some time in the future, sooner than later.

And as a side note to all the people complaining about all the 14/14 heroic people getting invites.  Stop your bitching.  I am 14/14 heroic and I have not received an invite either.  It just so happened that "some" 14/14 heroic players got invited this time around.  Not all of them.  I would not be surprised if they where people with many clears under their belts and not just a few here and there like me.  So just because you killed garrosh in heroic is not a free pass to the beta.  No need to say they are playing favoritism because they are not.  They are playing smart and they are inviting raiders to test the raiding.  There is nothing wrong with that and there is nothing worth complaining about.

Lets hope for the best case scenario and that would be raid testing is opening soon, and 6.0 might not be very far behind now and a solid release date to follow.  Sending invites to all those hard core raiders should be something a casual player is excited about, not jealous about because we did not get one.  As always, just my opinion of course.

Secondary Stat Attunements and You?

Let me start off my saying this... I do not like them.  Not at all.   Not any more at least, but I used to.

There are a great many changes coming to the game when warlords come out.  Some game sweeping ones that many might agree are needed like the stat squish and the removal of some stats like hit, expertise, dodge and parry.  There are also some changes coming that many can argue, quite possibly rightly so, are bad decisions on blizzards part such as the removal of flight, the changing of faction capitals and the removal of reforging.

Add to all that the fact that many specs are getting work overs, actually all of them are, just some more than others.  From ability pruning to changing how some abilities work, no class is making it through the beta phase unmolested.  Each and every spec has been stripped and changed.  However with many removals come some additions and one of those addition that I do not hear talked about quite often, at least in the speculation stage which is all we can do now, are the addition of spec attunements.

In case you missed it I will give it a quick run down of the attunements for all specs.  Mind you that things can still change, and they might have even changed already by the time you read this, but this is how it goes and what it seems like at the moment.

All specs get a flat 5% bonus to a given stat, they are calling it an attunement to the spec.

Death Knight:
Blood: Multistrike, Frost: Haste, Unholy: Multistrike

Druid:
Balance: Mastery, Feral: Critical Strike, Guardian: Mastery, Restoration: Haste

Hunter:
Beast Mastery: Mastery, Marksmen: Critical Strike, Survival: Multistrike

Mage:
Arcane: Mastery, Fire: Critical Strike, Frost: Multistrike

Monk:
Brewmaster: Critical Strike, Mistweaver: Multistrike, Windwalker: Multistrike

Paladin:
Holy: Critical Strike, Protection: Haste, Retribution: Mastery

Priest:
Discipline: Critical Strike, Holy: Multistrike, Shadow: Haste

Rogue:
Assassination: Mastery, Combat: Haste, Subtlety: Multistrike

Shaman:
Elemental: Multistrike, Enhancement: Haste, Restoration: Mastery

Warlock:
Affliction: Haste, Demonology: Mastery, Destruction: Critical Strike

Warrior:
Arms: Mastery, Fury: Critical Strike, Protection: Mastery

That is where they stand now, at least as I can find it from the most recent information I was able to dig up.  Remember, things could change and in truth, I am writing this post in an effort to show I hope they do change because I think stat attunements are a bad things.  A very bad thing.

When the attunements where first added they were just added as what they are, a flat 5% boost to a specific stat based on the spec you were playing.  I don't think anyone could complain about that.  Even if the stat was your worst stat it is still a free 5% of that stat and I do not believe anyone on the face of azeroth would ever complain about getting some free stats.

Sure, some people might have complained some saying they would prefer to get something more useful for them.  I can most definitely see a blood death knight saying they would rather have mastery as their free 5% or a guardian druid saying they would rather have critical strike as their free 5% or a destruction warlock saying they would rather have mastery as their free 5%. 

But either way, it does not change the style of your game play.  It is just an extra 5% of one stat or another.  Something akin to the radical abilities that that used to give an additional percentage to shadow defense or nature defense of hit rating, what have you.  Sure it was nice to have and sometimes it really helped but other times it is something that was just there an you forgot about it.

If blizzard left the secondary stat attunements at that all would have been fine with the world.  While people might have preferred a different stat for their free 5% they were not exactly going to give back the 5% they were given.  Even if it was their worst stat, it was still free stats.

But in more recent patches they have been changing classes to actually work with their stat attunement more closely.  Making it so that a class will, or should, actually favor the stat they are attuned too.

This is the stage at which I changed my mind from liking the stat attunements to disliking them and with each patch note we see released I move more and more toward the camp of people who would like to see these stat attunements go the way of the dodo.

I'll use the hunter class as an example because I know it better than the others but do not be fooled because what I am about to explain here holds true for every single spec and every single class.  You too are about to get completely screwed over by stat attunements and they are going to bend you over and not even use any lube, so be prepared, because it is going to hurt.

Hunters are probably in the best place they have ever been with concerns to secondary stats, at least as long as I have been playing.  I have never seen such a perfectly designed balance when it comes to secondary stats and I do not know about you but I love it.

If I take my gear right now and reforge completely to a critical strike build and then reforge again to a completely mastery build and then try it one more time to go completely haste and I test all three on the dummy for a few 5 minute sets you would see that my results would be within 1% of each other.  Now how is that for balance?  Blizzard has never in its history balanced secondary stats so perfectly.

I like this design because it makes gear choices easier.  An upgrade is an upgrade, plain and simple.  That, with reforging, makes for a very easy gearing up process.  If a piece has more stats on it, it is a better piece.

Now lets go through the series of changes and how they effected the hunter class (and all other classes too, this is not just about hunters).

Hit, expertise, dodge and parry being removed:

Awesome.  Not like we worried about dodge or parry on gear anyway but not having to worry about making hit and expertise caps makes sense.  I've been saying for about as long as I can remember that we are supposed to be the best of the best, the heroes of azeroth, how the hell can we miss attacking something the size of a house.  Hit and expertise never made any sense at least at max level and I can not even conceive of how some half witted developer actually thought this was a decent idea to add to the game to begin with.  Good riddance.

Reforging being removed:

Okay, this one makes no sense what so ever.  The biggest argument against the reforging was it involved too much math so you can get those hit and expertise and haste break points just as close to perfect as possible.  With hit and expertise removed and no more haste break points there was no complex math involved with reforging any longer.  So why remove it?  It makes absolutely no sense what so ever to remove it now.  Now you do not need an outside resource to help you find the perfect way to reforge your gear to get as close as possible to those numbers you need. 

Now reforging can be used for exactly what it would be perfectly meant for.  If you like your cobra/steady to be faster you stack haste, if you like to hit hard you stack critical strike.  No math involved.  If a stat is good for you, move into it, if it is not, move out of it. 

If anything reforging makes perfect sense now.  There was absolutely no reason to remove it and once again it shows that the people who design the game are, in a word, morons.  They wanted to remove it because there was too much math involved and then removed the need for math and still removed it even if the reason for removing it no longer existed?  What other word is there to use other than moron.

New secondary stats added:

Hunters are in a damn good place now, the best they have ever been.  I do not really look forward to new secondary stats.  Not even in the slightest.  Look how long it has been for the stats we have already and for them to find this perfect balanced world we are now living in.  Adding more secondary stats will surely break that balance up and we will move back into the world of stats that are good and stats that suck.  The last thing I want to be as a hunter who has gotten spoiled by good balance this expansion is to become a warrior that gets a really nice upgrade but it has haste on it.  Might as well have spirit on it for as freaking useless as it is.  And without reforging, that just compounds the problem.  Before we could have at least taken some of the shitty stat and turned it into something useful.  Now we just have a shitty stat that is useless.  Thanks blizzard, that is just what I asked santa for.

Attunements added for specs:

Okay, they are adding a flat 5% buff of stats for each spec.  Some of the choices added did not really seem to make much sense.  Giving someone 5% extra of their worst stat is not exactly a huge buff, but it was nothing to complain about either.  Maybe complain that you want a different stat, I can agree with that, but otherwise I never look a gift horse in the mouth and this is surely a gift horse.

Tying abilities to attunements:

Now this is were blizzard jumped the shark.  All the changes leading up to this were good or bad.  Some better than others but this one is bad, outright, completely, totally, and amazingly bad.  Not just bad as in haste for a warrior bad, but bad as in spirit on a lock bad.  At least haste works for a warrior even if extremely poorly, but spirit does nothing for a warlock, nothing at all.

Talking hunter here again.  Hold tight while I attempt to convey what is going through my mind and try to present it in a way that makes sense to more than just me.

If I am survival my attunement is multistrike.  Fine, I now have 5% more multistrike.  That does not mean I am current sitting at 5%.  It means I have 5% more than I have.  So if I have 100 multistrike from gear I will have 105 because of the attunement.  Following so far?

Lock and load now only procs from multistrike.  This is the crap I am talking about that really fuined the whole attunement thing.  This means as soon as 6.0 hits and I am sitting at 0 multistrike (for example, I might have a little because some hit or expertise might, just might, turn into some) and that effectively means I have a 0% chance to proc lock and load and explosive shot is where all my DPS comes from as survival.  Seriously, it is really where the numbers come from.  Explosive shot is actually a higher priority to hit than even our execute ability, kill shot.  So for people that do not play the class, this is our signature ability.  And we will not be able to get any lock and load procs because we have no multistrike which effectively makes survival absolutely useless once 6.0 hits.  You would probably get more DPS from a fresh 90 feral druid at the 435 item level than you would from me at 580 or so if I am playing survival.

You might argue that as time goes no I will get more gear with multistrike and I am making a mountain out of a molehill.  You are right, in a way.

Now lets look at the luck of gearing.  Lets say I get lucky and win a few pieces that first week or raiding in warlords.  None of those pieces have multistrike on it.  That means even if I wanted to play survival I can't.

Lets pretend for a moment that survival is the best hunter spec at the moment when warlords begins.  Without any multistrike gear it won't be.  It will be dead last.  A much much much lesser geared character with some multistrike will do better than a better geared player with none.

This all means that tying main abilities to secondary stats means you no longer can choose the spec you want to play, you have to choose the spec you have the gear for.  If I have a nice amount of critical or mastery I will have to roll marksmen or beast mastery.  Not because they are better, but because they are better with the gear I have.

If there were ever a reason we need reforging back, this is it.  We absolutely need reforging back if they are going to tie class defining ability to a specific secondary stat.  Just like we used to need 7.5% hit and 7.5% expertise, we are going to need xx% of multistrike or playing survival is just not viable.  Not even in the slightest.

So while I like having that free 5%, as I mentioned, who would not like it, I do not like that the bread and butter of a spec requires you to have that stat and we no longer have reforging to make sure we can have that stat.

We can argue if removing flying is a good idea or a bad idea.  That is opinion.  We can argue the moving of capital cities because we wanted them elsewhere.  That too can be considered opinion.  But you can not argue that tying class defining abilities to a certain stat is a bad idea, because it is a bad idea.  No its, ands or buts about it.

Isn't the whole concept of their design to be to allow us to play the spec we want to play?  Isn't the whole concept of the game design supposed to be that we want any upgrade and they are making it easier to get upgrades by sharing gear like they are doing?

If that is the case, then why make it that certain specs can not even function without certain stats?

We need reforging back if they want this design to work.  That is another thing that can not be argued.  Either that, or you better start collecting even more gear than before.  Have your critical set for marksman, your mastery set for beast mastery and your multistrike set for survival.

I don't like it, I don't like it at all.

Bad form blizzard.  Rethink this tying of abilities to specific stats.

Monday Random Thoughts

- This is the first monday in 4 weeks I do not report getting a new cloak.

- Between the previous week and this week both my hunters getting 2 runestones means I have to wait another week for both of them.

- I think I will take another break from LFR when they are done.

- Might not even rush to finish them.

- Did so much LFR I burnt myself out on it.

- Again.

- Ever heard the expression of being too accessible?

- I think that is part of the issue with blizzard design now.

- It gives you, at least in part, everything at your finger tips.

- My horde hunter is up to 556 now and is still wearing a 528 cloak.

- Can't wait for him to get it.

- I desperately need some real trinkets on that character.

- You never realize the huge impact trinkets have on your DPS until you do not have them.

- More so on opening burst.

- One run I was in, second boss, a new hunter comes in.

- On the pull he is sitting at 550K and me only 420K.

- Cool, I have a challenge.

- Being I over gear LFR it is rare you get someone else decent in the group.

- But I spoke too soon.

- I ended the fight at 300K and he ended it at 160K.

- He had good trinkets but not much else good which meant good burst but no sustained damage.

- I have horrible trinkets but decent gear other wise including the four piece so I do good sustained damage but have crap for burst.

- Seeing that really put an emphasis on how important trinkets are.

- Had some really horrible runs this week, horde side too.

- Horde is usually better.

- ToT 3, first boss, everyone dies on the maze except 4 damage dealers, 1 healer and 1 tank.

- Good thing the top 3 damage dealers survived and one was a lock that revived the other tank and a shaman healer popped or we would have wiped.

- Second boss, both tanks go down, I go down next, so fast I did not even have time to hit feign death.

- My own fault, I was flying on auto pilot, was not paying attention or I would have been able too react in time..

- Others start to drop.

- Our 2 locks, 3 druids and 3 DKS never even think about reviving a tank until more than half the raid is dead.

- They revive one tank, one healer and then on the last revive they bring up a damage dealer.

- What damage dealer do they bring up?

- Some guy in the middle of the pack.

- Not the guy that was doing 22% of the damage done in a 25 man.

- They bring up some guy that could not fight his way out of a paper bag.

- There were maybe a dozen other damage dealers doing better.

- There was me doing almost a quarter of all the damage done.

- But they bring up him?

- Ah, he is in the tanks guild.

- Now it makes sense.

- Reviving your guild mates even if they aren't really going to help as much as others would is more important than downing a boss.

- Got ya.

- And things like this are why LFR runs wipe.

- Can you now see why I need to step away from the LFR a bit again?

- I am surprised that blizzard has not insanely nerfed LFR yet.

- I think, more so for the SoO ones, a 50% nerf of everything across the board is called for.

- Wiping 3 times on protectors explains why.

- Top 3 damage dealers when we downed it with the 15% buff were as follows.

- A paladin doing insane numbers, me a couple of percent behind him and another hunter a few percent behind me.

- 4th place?

- A tank.

- 5th place, with 3 stacks, 66K.

- If the three of us were not there they would have never got it down.

- Damage dealers doing sub 50K, healers that refuse to dispel, the fight was completely undoable without us there.

- THAT is who the LFR is designed for.

- It should not be designed that us 3 damage dealers needed to combine for near 60% of the damage done to get something down.

-You can not expect 3 actually okay and decently geared players to always be there to carry the group.

- And lets not forget the 1 healer that did all the dispelling.

- So us 4.  We carried it.  And we still almost wiped again.

- I wonder if people purposely want to make people hate them sometimes?

- Some guy just started the runestone part and asked how long it would take, could it be done in one or two weeks.

- I said you get two guaranteed each week so if you do them all the worst case is 6 weeks but you can, if lucky, get an extra one or two and maybe get it done in as little as 3 weeks.

- I added that if they add the gaze of the black price again and you get really really lucky then maybe it could be done in 2 weeks.

- I think it was good information but some jackass had to say I was full of shit, even without the buff you can get it done in 1 or 2 weeks.

- One week my ass.

- I said there are 14 bosses, two guaranteed, that means you need to get 10 out of 12 to get through it in one week and even with the buff the odds of that are absolutely insane, so no, you can not get it done in 1 week, even if you are really lucky.

- He said, I got it done on one of my alts this week, all 12 over 2 days in the LFR.

- He lost any chance he had of anyone believing a word he said when he went there.

- It is like he was saying it because he wanted people to hate him.

- Perhaps a troll.  Perhaps just a jerk.

- But either way, stupid.

- After the fight the guy who asked the question said in chat, I think I will listen to the guy that knows how to play.

- Referring to me.

- The guy that swore it could be done in 1 week was pulling 40K and was in half way decent gear by LFR standards.

- I got a laugh out of it.

- After playing wildstar again this weekend I logged on to wow sunday night and just looked around feeling as I was home.

- Despite what we all complain about, there is a reason wow is number one.

- It is just so polished compared to other games.

- And do not get me wrong, I am really enjoying wildstar, but wow is still the best there is.

- I keep holding down shift while running in wow now because in wildstar holding shift gives you a little speed boost.

- Whenever I play a new game for a bit I come back to wow and try to do stuff from the other game.

- I remember one time after a diablo session I came into wow and clicked on the ground and wondered why I did not move.

- Silly elf that I am.

- The disorient in wildstar can be quite annoying.

- It is not a loss of control like in warcraft.

- It is a true disorient, to you, the person at the keyboard.

- I think that is kind of cool.

- It is like the blind in wildstar that just turns your entire screen black, but you still can use your abilities.

- Effectively, you are blind.

- With disorient your keys just get mixed up so moving forward might move you left and moving left might move you right, it changes and could be anything.

- Kind of bad when you can just end up running into a ground effect when you are trying to move away from it.

- But guess what I learned, mouse moving completely negates the effects of it.

- You might need to hold a strafe key or you will move on an angle with your mouse, but when you move with your mouse it doesn't matter if you are disoriented, you still control your character.

- Not sure if it is because I use a trackball that makes it work like that or if any mouse will do that.

- I can see if a trackball completely negates the disorient effect if some serious PvPers will try and go out and get one just to have the advantage of there being one CC that does not work against you.

- But be warned, it takes some practice to get used to using a track ball.

- Many people can't.

- Just like I can not use a normal mouse to play wow.

- I started to level a warrior, with intentions of being a tank and a medic, with intentions of being a healer.

- I can tell you one thing for sure, being a melee is such a HUGE advantage in wildstar.

- Sure you have to be close to stuff to hit it, which can sometimes be annoying, that is why people like range.

- But melee have an easier time getting out of things because 95% of the ground effects you can just step through the mob, and melee can take the hits of face to face combat whereas the ranged can not.

- Not to mention melee attacks are fast and ranged attacks take a year and a day to happen.

- From a PvP standpoint that means ranged it a lot harder to hit someone with.

- If it takes a few seconds to charge your ability that gives someone a few seconds to get away from it where as with a melee your ability is near instant.

- I guess in group content ranged would still be better because the boss should not be moving much if at all, so taking forever to charge an ability is not such a big deal.

- I made my medic a relic hunter and farming relics, they are like mines, surprised the crap out of me.

- Sometimes a mob pops up that spawns a bunch of adds and they can really put the smack down on you.

- I'll tell you one thing wildstar has taught me more than anything else.

- Something I already knew but it reenforced.

- Travel sucks.

- I so wish I had mounts at a lower level, faster mounts, or maybe even flying.

- Traveling by foot is slow, annoying, and a waste of time.

- It is a gaming mood killer.

- It is why I did not play wildstar more this weekend.

- I looked at how long I would need to walk to the next quest and said, screw it, going back to wow for a bit.

- So many quests I needed to get somewhere high and wasted so much time either figuring out how to get up there or running around stuff to get there.

- I never missed a flying mount more.

- But with all their things, like explorer where jumping around to get somewhere high, that is part of what the adventure is, to figure out how to get up there.

- Flying mounts would remove that because you would just fly up there.

- And that is why blizzard is not going to have flying in the next expansion.

- After playing wildstar I can't help but think that warlords is blizzard effort to make wildstar.

- From the events, to the jumping places to get somewhere, to lots of treasures, to garrisons, they are all taken directly from wildstar.

- The only difference between wildstars housing and warcrafts garrisons is that wildstars is designed to stay with you forever and you can design everything in it with tons of furniture and garrisons are something we are going to forget about as the next expansion comes out and it is not customizable at all except you get tons of followers.

- Lets compare.

- A housing system that I keep working on and it will be mine forever or something that is tied to one expansion and means nothing afterwards?

- Who wins?  Wildstar.

- A housing system that lets you place furniture, trees, and even build what could look like another building all on your own or basically do whatever you want with it or a garrison that has followers that you can not even name?

- Who wins?  Wildstar.

- Warcraft is still 10 times better than wildstar is, at least in my opinion, but they are trying to emulate something and doing it poorly.

- I wish blizzard would give housing the love it gave pet battles and attach it to the entire world.

- Now that I would love to see.

- Complain about it as much as we want to, but when blizzard puts it mind to something they usually do a decent job with it.

- Doesn't seem like they are putting their mind to warlords at all.

- Changing personalization and location options in garrisons, removing flying, moving capitals, etc.

- Sounds like they really are not putting their best foot forward.

- I would love to see what could have happened if they still seemed like they cared about making the best product with the amount of time they have had. 

- It just comes off like they are half hearted with everything they do lately.

- The biggest comment of recent that really has many scratching their heads was the comment about PvP mounts.

- Someone asked if they could have new PvP mounts.

- A blue responded that they did not have the resources to spend the time making new mounts.

- But we get a new mount in the store every few months don't we?

- Why didn't they just tell the truth.

- Why should we give some people a new mount for free when we can sell the mount and everyone can buy it and we make tons of cash.

- It is not that they do not have the resources to make new mounts.

- It is that they do not want to give it away now that they know they can sell them and make money instead.

- "we can't afford to make any new mounts, but you can buy a new store mount if you would like".

- That is what he meant in that post.

- I'll leave you with that one.

- Have a great day.

What If: We Lose in Warlords?

While thinking about what to expect the next expansion many things come to mind.  First off we will be seeing Gul'dan whom I have been, not so secretly, asking to be our big baddie for about 4 or 5 years now because I love the fact he is pure evil and not like all the others we face.  He is not corrupted.  He is not seeking a greater good.  He does not have an agenda.  He is just evil for the sake of being evil and I think that is what a true villain needs to be.  Sadly I do not see him being as big as I had wished him to be but that does not mean I am not glad we are going to be seeing my favorite bad guy.

So we do not know yet how the expansion will end, of course we do not, but it will come and we will find out.  Sometimes it is easy to see who the big bad guy will be.  It was easy to figure it out in BC, in wrath and in cataclysm without it even needing to be said and while we were told it would be garrosh in mists it was the road to getting there that told the story.  Blizzard is not very good at keeping secrets so we will find out who the big bad guy is for warlords before we even have a release date for it, I am almost sure of that.

But I would like to offer a what if scenario for a moment.  What if blizzard was good at keeping secrets and what if they had the ultimate surprise up their sleeves, something that would be OMGWTF awe inspiring.

What if we lose in warlords?

I am not talking about losing to the iron horde, I am talking about losing to the alternate universe's burning legion.

Here is how I see next expansion happening for my what if scenario.

We fight back the iron horde from out lands and keep them from entering again by bringing the fight to them.  This much we know is true so far but it is past that point that I go on a tangent we know blizzard would never have the balls to do so I will do it, just for fun.

After we start fighting the iron horde and taking out their leaders to make sure there is no threat to us our appearance there raises the interest of some very powerful beings.  Beings we know of as the burning legion.  We know that they have made contact, just look at Gul'dan for proof of that.  So it is only logically that they are keeping an eye on what is going on, seeing if the seed they planted is growing or dying.

When they come back to check on their crop of orc killers to find that not only has this massive army been dismantled but all its leaders are dead or dethroned, all except Gul'dan of course, who informs them of the encroachment of these creatures from another world.  This, of course, will require a swift and forceful response because these so called creatures have dismantled the army that the burning legion was making to carry out it whims as the front line fodder in their effort to take over new worlds.  The disturbance will need to be dealt with and swiftly.

In the second tier of raiding and story telling we will meet some of those legion members and fight our way through the camps they have begun to set up on the world.  We will get to meet, and kill, some of the most famous names we have ever had the pleasure to cross blades with but in a new and interestingly different way.  This burning legion is not the same burning legion we beat back, it is a stronger burning legion, one that resides in a reality where no one interferes with what they do and we interlopers must die and they have the power to make that happen.

We finish off the second tier of raiding by defeating the high commanders of the burning legion and seemingly dispelling them from the area.  This tier also ends with Gul'dan as the big bad guy of tier 2 because he was the one helping the legion get here sooner all thanks to the information he has learned from capturing and torturing people from our reality that knew about the portals and how they were originally created.  He was able to create them himself and he needed to be stopped as he was using them to call reinforcements from many different worlds to his side in an effort to keep us not only at bay, but on his world, until the leaders of the legion could come and claim our heads as their prize.

After we defeat him and close all the gates to the many different worlds he created we begin to pack our bags as the war is over.  Or at least we thought it was until names like Kil'jaeden, Archimonde and Sargeras show up to free Gul'dan and give him more power, absolute power, to open as many gates as he possibly can for a full scale invasion from all forces all over the galaxy.  No one has ever resisted them in this alternate universe like we have here and they will have none of that now on this world because all worlds belong to the legion or they burn.

Mountains of creatures from different planets come into the world and we are forced to fight them off with every last breath while trying not to let any into the gates to our world.  The massive flow of minions of the legion coming through the portal and the raw power Gul'dan is channeling begins to start to cause the world under his feet to tremble and crack.  The world will not survive, it will become as the one we know, broken and torn, at the foot of this epic battle.

Our job, as the heroes we are, faced with a challenge we can not win, is to keep the legions forces at arms distance from our portal to our world as long as we can and get as many survivors as we can off draenor in the last raid.  We go from zone to zone to hot spots of battling to save what few survivors are left on this planet that is being torn apart.  Draenor is a dead world now, the legion could not control it the way that they have controlled it before so they are destroying it in the process.

In their efforts they are not only killing every living being on the planet but they are making a push to come to our world because they wish to enslave us, the people that were able to stand up against them, the only true opposition they have ever had.  They want to make us part of them, assimilable us, because we would be great foot soldiers for them.

The last raid is us attempting to stop them from doing just that.  The first few fights are generals in the legion army and evacuating as many people as we can, leading heroes we knew from our past and some we just met to our world, people like Durotan, Y'rel and many other civilians and heroes of draenor.

As the time comes closer to full world destruction the bigger foes start pushing us backwards where we have to kill them before they can kill us and the people we are escorting off this dying planet and bringing to our reality.  This is the first raid where we are not moving forward to a boss, we are moving backward to escape through the portal before it closes.  Any wipe means azeroth, our azeroth, falls at the hands of the alternate universe burning legion.

Just when we think we have it all in our hands we come across a challenge, one we would have never imagined in a million years, one that couldn't possibly be true.  Gul'dan opens a gate and then disappears through it but his running does not surprise us even one iota as much as the surprise we get when we see ourselves walk through the gate and the battle begins.  We must face ourselves, our alternate reality selves, our empowered by the legion opposite selves.

People always wondered about azeroth in this alternate world, well, azeroth in this alternate world has been a legion stronghold for years.  Now we know and now we need to fight them, fight us, the alternate us.

After defeating them we think the coast is clear and we are tasked with closing the gates to our own alternate reality world before we head back to our world.  In a fight that will be completely random each week we end up fighting some of the greatest warriors from our past in their alternate reality legion infused versions.  The longer the fight goes the more heroes of our alternate world we need to kill meaning the group needs to work on destroying the gate and defeating people whom in our own histories are people we look up to with great respect and great honor.

Then the last battle comes, a battle against the big three, all at once, summoning minions, making advances, and we have to hold them back for however long the portal takes to close.  It would not be a set time, it would be some sort of mechanic, the further away from the gate we are the faster it closes, if we let the bosses or minions come closer the fights takes longer.

If we lose this fight our azeroth is destroyed and we see the legion marching through unopposed because all the worlds greatest heroes, the only ones that could have stopped them, were crushed under foot in the alternate universe azeroth.  In an interactive twist that has never been added to the game, once this last raid patch is released, legion forces will be pouring out of the dark portal and continue to do so until the some guild on the server downs it in mythic.  And then, each time someone wipes on the last fight in mythic, a small pack will come out even after that point.  So there will always be a part of the raid in the real game, interaction.  A wipe from any one on the server means mobs in the real world.

If we succeed the gate is destroyed and our world is saved with no way for them to come through to our world, at least not now, but we are left with knowing two things.  One is that we need to be on the lookout not only for our burning legion but a much stronger and much more advanced burning legion from an alternate reality and two being the knowledge that we have finally met our match and we can not win if ever faced with those numbers on our own soil.

We end the expansion knowing we might have saved ourselves but our interference destroyed a world and alerted another threat of our existence. In the end, we won a few battle but we lost the war, only escaping eradication but not even close to being able to call our venture to the lands of an alternate world a victory.  We leave it knowing how truly weak we are.  We leave it having lost the war for the first time ever.

How would you envision the next expansion if you could do anything you want, what if you designed the rest of the next expansion past what we already know?

Oh, some added lore for fun.

Durotan becomes the new horde warchief.  Y'rel becomes the new leader of her people and Velen steps down to begin building the army of light with Anduin and Baine.

Do You Feel Like You are Being Pushed Away?

It is a week ago today from when I downloaded wildstar to give it a try and while I did play it a lot this past weekend, during the week I had to try and see if I could still enjoy it in small doses when I could not really spend much time on it while I continued with my standard gaming on warcraft.

If anything my week in warcraft pushed me further into wanting to play wildstar.  It did nothing to try and keep me interested in it and by the end of the week it got two of my guild mates to say they are going to buy wildstar this weekend to join me over there because they too need a break from warcraft.

It reminds me of the first weeks of rift when 3 of our regular raiders decided to give rift a try and they have since disappeared never to be heard from again.  Well, that is an exaggeration, I still speak to one of them, and they just do not play warcraft any longer.

I still raided this week, albeit with a really rag tag group of people.  Some of the regulars, the few we still have after most seem to have quit.  Also have a few away for summer reasons.  Not sure if the ones that quit have just quit for the summer, forever or what, but it is really hard to get a decent group going when you have to start considering which one you want to take, the rogue that is 560 item level and doesn't listen to anything you tell them or the lock that is 560 that should be doing twice as much DPS and needs to have even the fights he has done 20 times explained to him again because he can't seem to remember from week to week.
Sadly enough these are the best that are available right now, or at least available to me.  Needless to say, we did not do any heroics this week.  The last thing I need is to bring these people that I would not even call LFR ready into a normal, there is no way in hell even in a dream would I bring them into a heroic.  I always bring in these people from guild as I always choose guild first and feel maybe we can train them so they can become better but still needed to pug two people.

We grabbed a friend of one of the raiders, a healer who we asked to DPS even if she had not DPSed, well, ever.  Her friend, who she referred to as someone that knew all the fights was pretty low compared to what we are used to but was okay I guess. At least she knew the fights unlike the lock I mentioned (and we ended up not taking), and did not need everything explained to her again and she listened to me when I said something unlike the rogue that will just tunnel sun all fight even if I keep saying off sun, off sun, off sun, because she doesn't like to move and sun never moves so it is easier for her to do her whooping 100K in 560 gear if she does not need to move.

The other fill in was a known twitch caster who likes to stream whenever she plays and has a small following.  At least she knew the fights and listened to instructions as well but you ever get someone that talks and you just think to yourself, please, just stop talking.  Yeah, that was her.  At least she only talked when she needed to but it sounded, at least to me, like she was trying to sound "cute" and I am sorry, I am not a 15 year old boy living at my parents house that would get all googly eyed over that.  If anything it has the completely opposite effect on me when I hear a girl trying to sound "cute" on voice chat.  It annoys me.  Needless to say, we will not be inviting her back even if she did not do poorly, she also did not do so great that I would be willing to set aside my dislike for the the "cute" talk.

We had always played with a lot of female gamers even if "girls don't play wow".  Throughout the history of the guild it has always had a lot of very strong female players in it.  If anything I think that has always been a huge strength for the guild.  Females that wished to play and not get hit on all the time and just play the game knew that our guild was a safe place for them.  We are all about the playing, and do not like the game to feel like a bar where you are there to pick someone up.

Over the years it has brought a few great female players our way including two female gamers that were in top 10 guild in the US in the past.  Sadly however, when they come to our guild because they want to take a step back and just raid casual we know it is with a time limit.  They usually quit after one tier of raiding.  We were a stepping stone to them quitting the game but I am still glad to have had them for the time we did.  It was kind of cool to say that at one point we had the number one healer in the world, according to WoLs at least.  That doesn't mean she was a great healer because for healing numbers aren't everything but it sure as hell meant she knew how to put out great numbers even if it was cheesing the charts.

Even with our long history of having female gamers in our guild I do not think I ever ran a raid where 6 of the 10 people were female.  Sadly one of those females came off as one of those female gamers that give female gamers a bad name, even if it is not intentionally and one of those female gamers really came off as the poster child for the saying that girls can't game.  At least one of those two I believe can learn, in time.

We only managed to make it to shaman in our 2 hours which is not half bad for a scraped together group that had me tanking on one of my low geared tanks, 529 as it was.  Over all it was not a bad run.  We had no wipes at all which is pretty darn good for the people we had with us if you ask me.  My tank replaced a 489 weapon with a 553 one which made holding aggro insanely easier thank you very much and I managed to nab 5 sigils on the run.  So it is a start for the character at least.

The lower DPS of the group put a lot of pressure on the two healers but they were both very geared and very skilled which made the fights lasting longer not as much of a problem as it would have been with lesser skilled or lesser geared healers.

It was not a bad run, not at all, if it were just some pug I picked up I would have even called it a very good run, but not being able to play with my people, the people I have been playing with for years, left me feel as if I were wanting more.  It left me feeling as if I would rather be doing something else.  Something else like wildstar.

I also managed to get the 4 runestone dropping LFRs done on one of my two hunters that are on that part of the quest.  The big problem is that usually I would have had them both done but as the first two really stressed me out, as I mentioned in a post a couple of days ago, I just logged out and gave up and went to play wildstar.

This is not a situation that is good for blizzard in my opinion.  More and more pushing me away from the game instead of keeping me interested in it.  I will, of course, come back to the game, but there are many people that are put into this position that will leave and never come back.  It is not a good idea to have he game ever hit a stage where people would rather not play it and that is exactly where I am right now.

I would rather be playing wildstar.  Heck, I would rather be watching reruns of law and order all day long.  Hell, I would rather go to the dentist and get elective root canal after that one LFR experience.  Things are rough when the game is effectively pushing people away from it and it has reached that point for me, or at least it feels that way.

I logged on to some characters to clear out mail that was about to expire.  Instead of bouncing it to another character because I often use the mailbox as a sort of storage medium I just left it in my bags thinking I will get to it later.  On the character I could of, or maybe should have, listed some stuff on the auction house to clear out some room I did not bother.

I logged on to other characters with the intention of doing some dailies to get some valor but after logging in and standing there for a few minutes I decided I did not want to.  I thought maybe I would do my ordos runs on all my characters like I usually do on reset day but decided against it.

In a way you can blame wildstar for that.  I had another option I could take advantage of right now and as it was my new bright shiny toy, it did draw my attention.  So I did not do as much as I would have normally did and it makes me wonder, am I popping on to wildstar more often than I thought I would because I actually like it or am I popping on to wildstar now because it is there and it really needs to be nothing better than just something to do because that is what I needed.

If I am so willing to find something else to do.  So willing to leave junk sitting in my bags, so willing to skip doing ordos on my characters this week, so willing to not list auctions, so willing to say I would skip this weeks raid, so willing to forget about doing things in warcraft maybe it is because warcraft is not really something I was doing because I wanted to any longer, it was something I was doing because it was habit, because it was something to do, because it was the standard way I pass the time.  I wasn't playing because I wanted to play.  I was playing because I always do.

Something games like this need to do is to keep you hooked, it needs to keep you coming back, it needs to always make you feel as if there is something to do, or you will go and find something else.  It is the nature of the beast.

I am not saying wildstar can replace wow, way too early to say that, but it is a very nice distraction right now with the lull in the game and with the feeling that blizzard is pushing me away.  I just wonder if there are others out there that are experiencing the same feeling I am right now, the feeling that the game is pushing me away, and maybe some of those people won't come back.  I will, I always do.  But as people love to say, I am not your normal player.  Maybe those others being pushed away right now won't come back.

Do you feel like you are being pushed away?  I sure do.  I feel like warcraft is giving me reason after reason to find something else to pass the time.

An Accidental Insult

I think I might have insulted a fellow hunter in an LFR the other day and I did not really intend to.  I was asked a question in a whisper and I answered it as I would normally answer it.  I did not look who asked it or look at numbers or another.  They asked, I answered, and I think I broke some unwritten rule of the brotherhood of hunters.

After the previous days horrible adventure through LFR that caused me to just log out I went back on my newest hunter to finish off the bosses I needed in an effort to collect runestones.  This means doing the second siege and the last throne.  For the record, I did not get any runestones except the 2 guaranteed ones.  Insert sad face.

This hunter has mostly blah gear having had won nothing off the celestial bosses and extremely little luck with ordos.  Not to mention I have a total of 1 kill on normal, Malkorok, in an effort to get a decent weapon.  Even if the character has completed the LFR and I think it completed flex, it has had no luck.  I have 1 tier piece from LFR and crap gear otherwise.  No gems as of yet but being I am an enchanter I did enchant what I was capable of doing and as a leatherworker I took care of my bracers and legs.

So I am sitting at a 531 item level mostly on the strength of timeless island burden pieces sadly but I do okay on the character even without the gear.  I pull upwards of 160K normally on something I can just pew pew on which I feel is quite solid for my item level.

So here goes where I made my oops.

I zone in on juggernaut in an already in progress run.  We wait a little before pulling but when we do I notice right off the bat I am having some huge hits.  Seems like I am having one of those lucky rights where I am landing many more critical strikes than my rating should allow me too.  I am over 240K for most of the fight but start to dwindle down at the end.  I knew it could not last, not in this gear, but I still manage to end the fight with 196K and, not surprisingly, top DPS and damage done.  It has to be my best ever on this character and well above what I am capable of doing in this gear.

I get a whisper from someone as we move on to the next pack of trash saying, "those are some impressive numbers for your gear, how do you manage that" to which I replied "Thanks, I have a lot of hunters this will be my 4th to get the cloak.  I just know how to play a hunter."

He then whispered me again saying "I guess that means I don't".  Not with a question mark.  I looked to the raid frames and saw his name then inspected.  He was a hunter too, mostly normal gear partially upgraded and only 2 pieces below normal.  He did not have the cape yet so I am guessing he was an alt or a new player.  He was also gemmed and enchanted completely.

I looked back to recount for that fight and he was second behind me in damage done and had a 189K DPS number.  I then whispered him, more so to make myself feel better because I now felt like I insulted him saying I just knew how to play a hunter, "I had a really luck run with a lot of crits"  He did not say another word.

I honestly felt bad because I think I insulting him and it was not my intention.  I would have answered anyone that way if they asked me how I do well in bad gear.  It really is as simple as I have a lot of hunters, I know how to play them.  It was not meant to imply that he did not know how to play one.  Sure, he should have been doing much better, maybe around 220K - 240K in his gear, but he was not doing what anyone would considered poorly.  At least not poorly by LFR standards.  Hell, by LFR standards he was doing fantastic.

I am not one of those people that live to insult people which it seems like most of the LFR community is but I felt a little bad about what I said afterwards.  Even more so when I tried to make my "sort of" apology when I mentioned it was just luck of the crit and he did not reply.

Oh well, if perhaps whoever that hunter was stumbles across this post, It was not my intention to insult.  We hunters need to stand together, we are not like other classes that shoot each other down, we try to help each other up.  Keep working and you will get better, you were not doing bad at all.  I just got really really lucky.  Ask any hunter and they will tell you 196K ungemmed at a 531 item level and no tier sets at all has absolutely nothing to do with skill, it was pure luck.

An Episode of Frustration

Yesterday I logged into my 3rd alliance hunter, one that is on the runestone quest line, being it was a new reset and I was hoping that maybe I could grab the last 5 runestones I needed but of course I was not expecting it.

I logged in and I was on the timeless island and noticed I still had the valor of the ancients buff.  Cool, this happens quite often actually, so I figured I would do a quick epoch stone collection and start my week with 300 valor instead of 200 valor.

But good news, apparently I had the quest already complete.  I capped last week before turning it in, so I can start this week with a quick 300 valor and then go about trying to get those 5 runestones.  I ran to turn it in and saw I got 1000 timeless coins but no valor.

Mother F'er.  I forget I was capped at 3000 on that character.  Son of a bitch.  I was so pissed now.  Upset with myself for not remembering I was capped and even more upset with the game for not giving me so sort of pop up that asked me something along the lines of "you will not receive valor as you are capped".   Sure, I was an idiot, I should have known better, I should have remembered.  But it was not a good start to the week.

You see, the reason I was capped on valor is because this character can not win a god darn thing.  I have been 90 for 11 weeks and I have done the celestial and ordos kill thing each week, with a coin each week, and won nothing.  So at the beginning of each week I try to do them first to see if I get something decent to upgrade and if I don't (which I never do) I go and upgrade one of my LFR pieces so I can gain more.  I will only upgrade an LFR piece as a last resort.  Who really would ever waste valor on it on purpose?  Seriously.

Okay, I screwed up my whole week already, or it feels like it, so maybe the gods of the game will shine on me some and let me win something from a celestial for the first time... ever.  11 weeks and I have won nothing, not even a PvP piece which would also be a nice upgrade for me being my best pieces are timeless burden pieces or LFR pieces so even a 550 PvP piece would be a pretty sweet upgrade, but no, the game won't even spit one out for me.

The tiger was up and being attacked so I joined in.  It went down fast but without heals I needed to deterrence his lightning to limit the damage to me.  Outside of that as a damage dealer on the tiger there is no damage so you do not need heals and it does not matter if you are outside of the group.  If you get hit by the barrage I only have one word for you.  Move.  Really, there is no reason anyone should ever get hit by that.

I get what has become the normal off the boss a bag of gold.  Woo f'n hoo I am so excited.  I use my coin and to my surprise, or should I say not to my surprise, I get gold, but at least it was 114 gold.  Always look on the bright side they say right?

So I start to head up to ordos.  I will enter the in game finder once up there.  I do not join in when I am not standing there already.  I hate those people that expect you to summon them there.  If the warlock needs to work his ass there than your lazy butt can get there too.  If you are too lazy to get to ordos then I am too lazy to summon you.  I will not even help summoning people.  At least not people that use the in game system.  If you are using the in game system be there before you join in.  If someone invites a guild mate, then I can see summoning them.  It was an invite.  It was not someone that used the in game system.  If you are taking the time to list your name in the system you can take the time to get there before you list your name.  Simple as that.  I hate lazy people, maybe even more than I hate stupid people.  Sometimes stupid can't be cured, some people are just stupid.  But lazy can be cured.  It is called doing something.  Lazy is a choice and I make the choice not to play with lazy people.

Enough on that because I did not need to use the in game system anyway.  I saw a ton of horde running up the hill and noticed they were all from different servers.  Seems like the horde must be assembling for ordos.  Awesome.  I will just join in and tag it.

Nearly all the horde people are flagged, so I am very careful with my tabbing, the last thing I want to do is get flagged and then killed 20 or more to 1 and not get my shot in.  After I get my shot in, who cares, but shot comes first.

When I get to the courtyard they had just pulled.  I made it in time.  I make my way though the court and run up and lay in a few attacks then try to find myself a safe place to hang out.  It seems all the horde people that get the debuff all come aiming for me and standing on me with it.  As I move they move with me.  I would call them jerks or assholes or what have you, but they are the enemy, standing on my and doing damage to me is actually a smart move.  If it were my own faction then I would say they were jerks and assholes but when it was the opposite faction, more so PvP players, their job is to kill me and I am not flagged so in truth that is a pretty cool way to try and kill me.

The thing I I know of a few secret places by ordos where you do not get popped up.  I basically kite them around and when they are about to explode I step where I know I will not get knocked up and they go flying and I stay on the ground.  One point alliance, zero points horde.  Three times during the fight someone tries to stand on me, three times during the fight they go flying and my feet never leave the ground.  Three points alliance, zero points horde.

Then I get the debuff.  All there alone, don't really think there are any alliance up here, and I think to myself that no matter what, even if I do not go flying, the debuff will kill me.  It hits for a lot and I have very low life because I can't win any freaking gear.  Then I suddenly notice I am getting heals, and bubbles.  It seems there is a disc priest alliance side attacking and it is bouncing the heals to me.  Awesome.

The fight ends and I win something.  I won a neck.  Of course the worst thing you could possibly win, but still something right?  I can now spend some valor so I can earn some more.  I am so glad I will be upgrading a 559 instead of another 528.    Every time I need to waste valor on a 528 it hurts me inside.

In my excitement to have actually won something for the first time from either the celestial or ordos bosses in what is now my 12th week using a coin for each and every kill I did not noticed that there was a horde that still had the debuff and he got me this time.  I went up in the air but I hit disengage before I land and there is no damage to be done.  Nice try my goblin horde buddy but you need to be a hell of a lot more innovative to catch a hunter like that.

I hearth back and upgrade my new neck.   Now I can gain valor again.  But I should be at 300 valor already and I am still pissed about that.  I swear I was on the verge of writing a nasty ticket about it saying I wanted my 300 valor.  I knew better, so I didn't.  It is my own fault and really making 300 valor is not all that hard.  Grab a couple of friends, do a couple of scenarios, 10 minutes later you have the 300 valor.  It is the principle of the matter.  It should not have let me turn it in without letting me know I would not be getting the award for complementing the quest.

I queue up for the LFRs.  Needing 5 runestones I queue up for ToT 3, SoO 1 and SoO 2.  leaving ToT 4 for last in case I get lucky enough to get all 5 before the last boss so I can port out, turn in the quest, and then come back and get the heart.   Makes sense to me.

I fly back to the island so I can pick up a coin with timeless coins to try and roll to win the pet, again.  I do TOT 3 on multiple characters every week, I use a coin on all every week, I never win the freaking pet.  I am not going to pay the 80K they go for on my server.  Just give me my damn pet.

Nothing is worse than killing the same boss 100 times with 100 rolls and still not getting something.  Want to talk about frustration, that is frustration.  I hate RNG, have I ever mentioned that?  I think it might have come up a time or two.

I get ToT 3 first, an already in progress group.  Son of a... oh wait.  They are still on trash.  Not bad at all then.  I hate having to queue up for the same raid over again.  If I want all bosses I should be allowed to check something that says give me a fresh run.  I have, on more than one occasion, had to queue up for the same instance 3 times to get it done.  Come in on last boss.  Queue again, some in on second boss.  Then be stuck having to queue a third time.  Screw that.  There should be an option, fresh run only.  If you do not click it that means you are willing to take anything that they give you.

The run goes easy enough.  We do not have stellar DPS over all but there is one lock in the group doing 400K so he alone makes the run faster.  Combined with two tanks over 1M life and apparently knowing what they are doing and the fights all go smoothly.  I do not win any runestones however.  I do not even win any loot.  Not like I really need 502 loot but I am an enchanter and I do not mind getting myself a few extra sha crystals here and there.  They still sell somewhat nicely on that server to the tune of 90 gold.

Next up pops SoO 1 and again an already in progress group.  Son of a... oh wait.  They have not downed the first boss yet.  And it seems I have a few stacks of determination.  Should I cry now?  Stacks on the first boss... on a reset day.  How bad is this group?

There is this one loud mount yapping away when I come in saying how everyone was doing everything wrong and they all suck and blah blah blah yap yap yap.  I tuned the guy out.  Then he went on his I am the best player here and I can't carry all of you, I am top DPS. so forth and so on.  All I can think is "not any more".  If someone is that loud in an LFR there are one or two reasons.  They suck and they are trying to make themselves feel good or they are really uber and think they are better than anyone else.  From this person tone, at least as best you can catch a tone from typed words, he was the former.  A bad player that just happened to be the best in a bad group.  So I was sure his spouting of I am the best DPS here would prove false.  This hunter might have shit for gear but I am 100% sure that my ability will surely propel me past any LFR hero even in crap gear.

Fight ends, we down it, and we needed the stacks of determination it seemed.  Sure the first boss is a horrible judge for DPS because of all the down time but even at that the DPS in the group was horrible.  Not only was I, as I said I would be, tops, I was tops by a long shot and that is rather sad being I was not doing particularly well.

Mr I am the top DPS had nothing to say after the fight was over and oddly enough he had nothing to say the rest of the run.  Apparently he has recount and saw he got his ass kicked.  When sitting at the second boss I check his gear.  Pretty sweet.  He only has 2 pieces that are not normal.  He should have ripped me a new one.  This ladies and gentlemen is the type of person people are talking about when they use the term LFR hero.  They are usually top of the LFR because they over gear it but otherwise they are fairly poor players.

Second boss manages to see us wipe once and almost wipe another time.  Still no runestones.  Third boss is more of the same and with our DPS I don't see how the hell we are going to manage this one.  Even the LFR hero, being the poor player he is, does worse than normal because he stays on the boss 100% of the time doing reduced damage instead of killing adds and doing full damage.  When the fight ends the top 4 damage dealers are basically the only 4 people that did any damage to the adds.  Maybe if the LFR hero would look to this recount and instead of just seeing he got his ass kicked again but not only by me but by others as well and instead of just looking at the number but looking at what we did damage too he might learn something.  I am amazed we did not wipe, I am not amazed I did not get a runestone.

So 6 bosses down already and no runestones, at least the last boss will give me one.  We wipe on the trash, not once, not twice, not even three times but what seems to feel like 100 times.  Damn healers keep dispelling people even after we tell them not to.  I stay outside after I run back in.  Stupid healers refuse to listen and keep killing people and with three priests and three mass dispels they are wiping people at record pace.

I have a feeling this fight is going to be really interesting.  Just like they had issues with dispels on protectors they will surely have an issue here and not understand you should only dispel when you have the buff.  Or in the case of the priests they will try to mass dispel, which I believe does nothing.  How can they forget where their dispel button is when they need to use it but when they should not be dispelling they went dispel crazy?

We wipe on the last boss 3 times before we get it.  Lucky for us we had a few sub par damage dealers drop and be replaced with some powerful players.  It is sad when you actively desire real raiders to finish an LFR.  The LFR hero should be the super hero of the group.  They should not need a half heroic geared lock to come in and do 500K.

We down the boss and I do not get a runestone.  WTF?  This is the guaranteed one.  Only, absolutely, this one is getting me to put in a ticket.  As I am opening to put in the ticket the runestone pops up.  It must have just been delayed for some reason.  Normally I just drop group.  I am glad I didn't.  If I just dropped group I would have not got it and then been left up to the whim of a GM and if he was in a good mood or not on whether he would give it to me or not.

I am not having a hell of a lot of luck so far today.  Turned in my stupid valor quest when I was capped.  For the 12th week in a row I killed a celestial and did not get anything, and for the 12th week I used a coin and did not get anything, not even so much as a PvP piece.  I wiped multiple time to something you should never wipe to.  I've waited for far to long as a damage dealer in queue.  And I forgot to pick up my coins when I went back to spend the valor on my neck.  Things are just not going my way.

I get into gates, which we all know is a freaking nightmare to begin with in the LFR.  I take a quick look at the tanks, we have one that is well geared for an LFR and another that looks as if they would be suspect in an MV LFR.  Why do I get 1M health tanks in ToT and 400K ones in Gates?

It seems like the low geared tank is the dominate one.  Or maybe just the stupid one.  You decide.

He charges in before everyone has even walked down the path and pulls everything and dies instantly.  I had set my MD to the higher health tank so I just hit my MD marco and unload some multis hoping the other tank is actually here and paying attention.  All the mobs go flying for him and he goes down instantly too.  Guess he was not exactly ready maybe?  I will not pass judgement on his tanking ability just yet.  He did not do anything so not sure what he ability is.

We wipe 4 times on the trash, as in complete wipes.  Total wipes.  No one lived wipes.  All because mr 400K life decided that we needed to play a game of "but we do this on heroic" and pull the entire row of adds at once.  We finally kick the under geared, under skilled, basement dweller of a tank and get another piece of work.  At least this one had more gear even if it was only a little more.  He also seems to know what he is doing which can make up for a lack of gear, to some extent.  He is geared more than ample for the LFR however, even if seeing 500K life might seem like a little and it is.  With the appropriate level of skill it is more than you will ever need for LFR content.

We spend the next 15 or so minutes after clearing trash talking about tower groups.  I am not kidding about the time either.  It took that long to decide on towers.  Finally when the groups for towers are set up we pull the boss.  Of course some dim wits die to the point that one mob spits out because they do not move from it and we are down three damage dealers near instantly when that happens.  Then the tower group goes up and the two drakes come down and seemingly one shot the tank and then go on to dismantle every one else down there.  I look at my raid frames to see where the healers all.  Guess what?  All 6 healers went up on the tower.  You have got to be kidding me.  We spent 15 minutes setting up towers.  It was asked, and answered multiple times who the tower healer was.  So why did all six healers decide to go up to the tower?

Take two, more people die to the point puddle, will people ever learn.  So we are down 2 healers and 2 damage dealers instantly this time.  One was the tower healer.  No one got them up and the tower tank did not notice it, so the tower team goes up and dies.  This means another wipe.

Take three, again more of the time, idiots in the poison puddle die instantly, only two this time.  I swear they have to be dying to it on purpose.  No one is that stupid.  Only one healer goes up on the tower this time and they can't keep the tank up so the tower tank goes down followed by the tower team and then the entire raid.

Tower tank, the one with the lower life, but not a bad tank over all outside of not noticing he did not have a healer that one time, drops group without a word.  We have to wait for a new tank and we go over tower teams again while waiting.

Take 4 some 10 minutes later and it goes a lot smoother this time. Only one person dies to the poison cloud and the new tank that was doing towers, reminiscent of the first one, a 500K (with stacks now remember) tank that apparently was not really a tank at least managed to work as a meat shield somewhat.  He went down in the first tower but was picked up quickly and no problem.  He went down again in the second tower and someone ran up there and picked up him.  We lost a couple of damage dealers but not enough to stop us.  Finally we get the boss down and everyone spreads out all over the place.  People yell to stack, over and over and over but no one listens.  Just a few decent players like myself, a shaman and 2 other hunters, are stacked, everyone else is everywhere else.  The baby tank goes down.  The other tank tries as best he can to hold out and does a damn good job of it, but the healers can not come close to keeping up with the damage and the tank eventually goes down and so do we.

Someone posts healing done and there is one healer doing 60K and the rest are under 30K.  That is why we were wiping, holy crap that is bad.  60K with stacks should be the worst healer in there, not the best.  Both tanks did more healing than 2 of the healers.  The elemental shaman in the group did more healing than 3 of the healers.  WTF were the healers doing in there.

Take 5, more poison deaths, more baby tank dying in the towers, more wiping.  Same with take 6.

Take 7 and I am at the end of my wits.  This is the day after reset, it is when the best player are supposed to be playing.  If this is the best this game has to offer in the random setting we have a lot of issue with the game.  I have no clue why I am holding out, why I am still here.  I just want to get my freaking runestones.  I am already having a crap day in game I do not need more of this shit.

We wiped again, once more at the end of the fight because people are not stacking up, healers are not keeping up, and that other tank keeps freaking dying.  We get closer this time, much closer, but still not really a great attempt.

The top healer this time was 78K, the others were still all in the 30s or lower.  How is that even possible with all these stacks.  The only good healer, and I use that word loosely because with as many stacks as we had 78K is pretty dreadful, drops group.  So now we are down to only the super crap ones.  Then the one good tank we had that was with us from the beginning drops as does the elemental shaman that was tops in damage done and usually 3rd or 4th in healing done drops and I can't stay.  We lost the top healer, top tank and top damage dealer.  I drop too.

Screw this, do I really need another hunter with a cape, do I really want to put up with this, do I really want to stay for all these wipes just to continue to not get runestones?  I am having a hard time finding a reason to play when this is what I get subjected to.

You want to know the kicker of this whole thing that I find funny but not in a ha ha sort of way?  I am probably going to finish the legendary quest line before I win anything off the celestials and that is with doing it every week since I hit 90 and using a coin each and every week.  Not even one piece of PvP gear.  Don't ever talk about bad luck unless you mention me because my bad luck rules all.  I hate RNG but at the moment I do not hate RNG more than I hate the people in the LFR.  All I wanted to do was have a little fun killing some internet dragons and they made it impossible to do so.

When I got out I went to the little hut on the timeless island and logged out and exited the game.  Screw this, I'll go play wildstar instead.  At least if I am going to die 100 times it will be me dying there because I did something stupid instead of other people subjecting me to death.

I just reached a level of frustration that could not be matched and I could not take it any more.