Alliance Paladin!

     My 12th 90. Though I am not sure it entirely counts since she only actually leveled as far as 60. I finally got around to getting my pre-order and as planned Ailuuya got the boost.

     Now I have a maxed out paladin that's not a belf, Horde, or even a male, though Ailuuya did come very close to being rolled as a male draenei instead. I'm glad she wasn't though. I'm very happy with her just as she is, even if her transmog choices are a bit limited by my refusal to put her in plate that doesn't cover her vitals. I boosted her as prot and then promptly dual specced holy and gave her a set of Timeless Isle Gear for that to ease her gearing process. Next the mog hunting will begin, though for now that Timeless Isle Holy Paladin gear doesn't look half bad.
     Tyl and Rothorin will be grateful for her assistance with Jewelcrafting and Alchemy, and I'm happy that I now have one each of my three favorite classes maxed out Ally side.

Mog Roulette and LFR accidents

     This post about Transmog Roulette from Navimie intrigued me enough that I couldn't resist trying it using Kamalia's suggestion of a D20 and Seish's overfilled banks, bags and void storage.

Screenshot is kind of small but I think it's probably big enough to make out the disaster his mog would be if we let the numbers decide on it. He refuses to even consider wearing it for long enough for a bigger screenshot. Me on other hand? I was amused enough to try it again, just for fun.

This one's... slightly less ugly maybe? Seish still refuses to wear it and I honestly can't blame him. Besides... I did just put him in a brand new mog that actually looks really nice.

     Aside from playing around with dice and mogs I've been working on Tyl's quest. He's on Runestones so I put up with those hunter queues to see how many he could get this week. 11/12 as it turns out, which is more than a little frustrating but at least I know he'll be able to finish next week. In the meantime though his queue into the Halls of Flesh Shaping was interesting. After waiting for about an hour he zoned in... and... fell onto some stairs where he was joined by a Death Knight and a Priest. It took me a little bit to figure out that where we had ended up was actually a room under Primordius' pit.

     We were under the floor. I briefly stopped being annoyed about a partial run and started wondering how the heck we had ended up in a room under the floor where there didn't seem to be a way to get out. We were still taking damage from the trash before Dark Animus too. Luckily they stopped combat long enough for us to zone out and back in and join them, but I'm still curious about why we fell through the floor in the first place. So far it's been an interesting week.

Maybe I'm a Masochist or something

     After posting my Blue ROYGBiV design for Seish I finally got the shoulders from LFR. I like those shoulders too much to mog them into something else so I popped over to visit the ethereals to see what I could do with them... and realized that the only pieces I was actually missing to dress him in that very mog in game were the boots and sword. And Rim could make the boots. So he was kind enough to run over and do heroic violet hold for a frozen orb... and make Seish some boots. The sword, well that requires Ulduar so it might take some getting, but in the meantime Seish has one that doesn't look too bad. So here's what it looks like with the cloak proc.

     And that should be enough, except Tyl's finished his cloak work for the week (4/12 Titan Runestones) and that buff just keeps staring me in the face. And then while I was on Rim I noticed that he was already exalted with everybody's favorite pain in the neck Black Prince. And he's the odd paladin out with no cape. But I really don't want to tank LFRs. But the buff... I should at least get him the sigils. So...I've tanked three LFRs this week, so far. One of them I was even the not dumb tank who didn't get kicked. That made me feel good.
    Really not sure I'll actually manage it on him. That's a lot of tanking for angry people with a co-tank that won't communicate with me more than half the time. But I like tanking. And I'd like to earn Rim his tanking wings.

ROYGBiV Blue Transmog!

     I'd half thought I'd do another monk mog for this. That had been the nebulous plan anyhow, but as tends to happen I got hit with another inspiration for it. So I treat you all to yet another paladin mog for glorious male blood elves. (Though this is one that doesn't lose any metal when you put it on women for a change.) Comes in two versions: Legendary and Moggable cape.
   
Seish's 'Blue Wings' Transmog

Head: Jade Circlet
Shoulders: Pauldrons of Winged Triumph
Chest: Light Elementium Chestguard
Hands: Gloves of Winged Triumph
Waist: Lightbringer Girdle
Legs: Legguards of the Emerald Brood
Feet: Runic Plate Boots
Back: Gong-Lu, Strength of Xuen
Weapon: Abaddon

And the Non Legendary Version:

Back: Cloak of the Frigid Winds

Random stuff post

     Seish is probably the least financially responsible of all my characters. If he wants something he'll buy it and there's no talking him out of it. So he made himself a ruby panther, and now needs to earn more pocket money if he doesn't want to be broke come Warlords. Luckily he's probably got time.
     Tyl's still working on his legendary. 8/20 secrets and Rothorin's babysitting the trillium. The one advantage to the long hunter queues is it gives him plenty of time to leisurely grind up the last of the Black Prince rep he needs while he's waiting.
     I've been wanting to try Flex raiding very badly, but sadly I don't know enough people to put one together with. So finally Saturday night I decided to just bite the bullet and put Laen's name up for one through other raids. Time for him to live up to the work we put into for those healing wings. I was a little bit scared and dreading it a bit when I got an invite. It was a pug just as much as LFR is. I didn't know any of the players and they didn't know me. We didn't have voice chat and I only know the LFR versions of the fights.
     I was candid about that and was just told to heal my butt off. And then they sorted out the groups and off we went. It was easier than LFR?! At least it felt that way, maybe because nobody was afk and everybody was competent enough to be fully capable of pulling their own weight. The worst trouble we ran into was two wipes on Sha of Pride. They may have been partially my fault. There were mechanics I didn't know and the first time I hadn't cleansed because I didn't have Gift of the Titans and got told I needed to do some whether I had it or not. But once we got that sorted out and I figured out the projections... that went down too.
     It felt really good. I want to do more flex. I want to get at least few more pieces of gear and learn the fights and then see if maybe there's any chance Laen can pug his way into a normal for the Garrosh kill achieve. It's not the way I'd like to raid. I kind of wish that I had the time to hunt up a raiding guild for myself, but I have responsibilities that don't let me commit to a steady raiding slot. I think it would be more fun with the camaraderie and the banter that comes from knowing people, but if I want to do it I have to do it the way I can.
     Still, if anybody finds themselves in need of a holy paladin some time... have wings, will travel.

The worst dungeon experience I ever had in WoW

Wasn't this dungeon, but these characters. This screenshot makes me so glad for transmog.

 Warning of sorts:    This will be a long possibly somewhat rambling post. I debated about making it at all, but well, it still bugs me and maybe it will feel good to write it out. After all, nobody is obligated to read it. This isn't a story about wipes or people ninja-ing loot. If it was I'd most likely have forgotten about it by now.

     Back in Cataclysm I was a new tank on my 85 protection paladin, Rim. I'd picked up the patterns for Firelands weapons on Rim and was forced to learn to tank heroics so I could get chaos orbs to make them for my guildies. My friend, Os' player back on her original account, was an experienced tank and healer and she'd often come along to heal them for me and coach my tanking in vent, so that helped my confidence and did wonders for my tanking too. We were a great team and we had a lot of fun.
    This particular run was Stonecore heroic, I'd done it several times before, I knew the fights, still hated some of them, but knew them very well. We'd queued together as tank and healer, and lacking any available guildies for dps had picked up three randoms. It was a fairly decent typical run until most of the way through. We'd cleared the area in front of Ozruk of trash and Os' priest, Roy had taken a seat for mana. So I stood there waiting and running through the fight in my head, because I was still a rather nervous tank.
     One of the dps got impatient and started nagging at me to go, repeatedly, but I said very simply in party chat. "I never pull while the healer is sitting." Partly because we were in vent and I was waiting for her to let me know she was ready. But at that point that dps and one of the other's started calling me noob and a few other names I didn't even recognize at the time, but later looked up and found out were racial slurs. Nice. I was annoyed but well there are jerks.
     She gave me the go ahead, so I pulled. We executed Ozruk pretty much flawlessly, nobody died, nobody wiped. End of story, right? Except that at that point Os' player, who had been tabbed out while getting mana scrolled up and saw the commentary from before. 'If that was meant for the tank, she was being smart.' she typed in. 'We're in vent and she knows I sometimes tab out while I get mana.' And that's when the crap really started. I didn't screencap this. I don't remember the exact words but the immediate response was very close to this: 'Oh... SHE... that explains everything right there.'
     The entire rest of the dungeon those same two dps subjected us to every variation of 'you losers should go back to the kitchen and stop playing this game' that I have ever heard, with some obscenities thrown in here and there. It still makes me angry thinking about it. I hadn't done anything wrong in my tanking, I had the aggro, I did the mechanics, nobody died. Heck nobody had even complained about anything until I refused to pull while my healer was getting mana. But the second Os' player used a female pronoun and they found out it wasn't a guy behind Rim's avatar we both got treated to some of the most blatant and obnoxious sexism I've ever been subject to.
     I don't recall the third dps saying anything. I don't recall us saying a whole lot in party chat after that either. I just remember reading the stupid, uncalled for stuff that scrolled across my screen and being so mad by the time we had downed the last boss that I logged off for the day. Probably I should have dropped group, more than likely I should have ignored them, but we were done with all but the last boss by then and I wanted my one in five chance at a chaos orb. I didn't even remember there was an ignore function then... if I actually knew. I was still fairly new to the game.
     It didn't make me stop tanking. It didn't make me stop playing WoW or enjoying playing Rim. It did make me fairly cautious about revealing my gender to anybody while tanking. And no matter how many dungeons I run where people do silly things and we wipe and someone steals loot I want... I doubt anything will ever make me quite as mad for quite as long as that did.

Minipost: Another Lucky Day

     We weren't lucky enough to get another blue drake too yesterday, but Seish got his Azure Drake! I love it, it matches his armor and cape proc really well. I love the armor and glowing runes on a drake design that I've always been fond of anyhow. 188 mounts!

How we deal with people

     Getting this far toward Tyl's legendary has involved a lot of random heroics and a couple of heroic scenarios with people I've never met before and will probably never see again. And between the heroic I ran the other day and this post from Matty I've been thinking a lot again about how we deal with each other in WoW. LFRs can be awful cesspits of terrible behavior, everybody knows that. I haven't tanked more than one on Rim, not because that one went at all badly but because I know the second anything does verbal abuse is almost inevitable. The question is, does it really have to be?
     I've got a rule for myself when I notice somebody doing something 'wrong' in a dungeon or raid. It's a rule born of thinking about how I wish people would handle it when I make a mistake, how I'd have liked them to treat me when I was a little nooblet and didn't understand that ret meant dps and that I couldn't tank that way. (Thankfully I only tried in a guild group and it all went fine, but it could have been horrible.) The rule is, I don't call them out in party chat, no matter how kindly I might word it, because that's embarrassing and would put me on the defensive in their place. Instead I whisper them, and I add a smile and do the best I can to make my words kind and not accusatory.
     Sometimes this goes well. I ended up having an interesting chat with a tank in an LFR via whispers as an indirect result of this. Sometimes they just fix the problem and don't say much. Sometimes, though, it goes like it did the other day.
     Went into a heroic with Tyl and after realizing growl was on after the first pull in Stormstout Brewery I turned it off... and wondered why I was still sharing aggro with the dps dk on the next pull. So I looked at the paladin tank and realized he didn't have righteous fury on. I whispered him to remind him and commented that I forgot it too sometimes when I'd switch specs. I got no response. Righteous fury didn't go on. We ran that dungeon with aggro divided between three dps and the dk getting louder and more abusive in party chat with every passing minute. I whispered the paladin again halfway through but he never responded. By the end of the dungeon I was as frustrated as everybody else, though I'd never have said what the dk said in party chat, even if by the end I had mentioned the righteous fury issue in party.
     I don't know what was going on with that paladin. I'm fairly sure he was boosted but it felt less like he didn't know what to do and more like he wasn't trying. And my rule didn't work. Sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes people have been so mean to each other that people expect abuse to the point they don't seem to see anything else. I whispered someone in Hellfire Ramparts where Saelindir was priesting. "Great tanking :)" And after a pause I got this whisper back. "Not sure if sarcasm." I didn't get a thank you until I'd hastily assured them that it wasn't. They were an excellent tank after a string of okay ones and I wanted to let them know, that was all.
     It makes me sad that the first place that person's mind went was sarcasm when what I had meant was a compliment. It makes me sad that that's just kind of how stuff is. I hesitate even to whisper that hunter whose pet Laen can't keep up because they have growl on. Because I don't want them to think I'm being mean, I just noticed something they might have missed and want to help by pointing it out. If Snowthorn's growl was on, or Rim forgot his tanking cologne I'd hope somebody would whisper me with a little heads up. I hope they wouldn't be enough of a jerk to me in front of everybody over a little mistake that I'd be left wishing I hadn't logged on at all. Most of all, though, I hope I never leave anybody feeling that way myself.