One Syllable to Rule Them All

When you're thinking about naming your character, be careful and consider this: Unless your name is 5 characters or under, your guildmates will probably forever refer to you by the first syllable in your name.

I made the character Diagnose (my rogue) to take advantage of the conjunction with "the Patient" title. The guild I was in started referring to me as "Dia" instead of Diagnose, so when it came time to create an alt, rather than confuse everyone, I chose a new name that started with Dia - Diagram. If I'd planned ahead I would have made the priest Diagnose and the rogue Diagram, but whatever. Every time I make a character I think that it might end up being the most important character I have, otherwise I probably won't finish getting to 80 with it.

So if I follow the current pattern, I found a list of other words that start with Dia. Diabolic would make a nice warlock name, and Diamond would make a good tank. You can be pretty sure that I won't have a character named Diarrhea though.

So even though Putrescence sounds like a fun name to have, don't be surprised if down the line everyone in the guild starts referring to you as "Poo."

Escape

There's a number of reasons people play warcraft. Educators are studying the internal rewards system and examining why kids will play for hours and hours on end - even while stating that they are bored with it and tired - because it can be addictive for some people. Others like to see the graphics and interaction of the game, and when they've soaked up all of the visual potential, they grow tired with it. Some people like to log in and sit around and chat.

Unlike most people, I know exactly why I play because I've thought about it, and I think about it every time I plunk down $30 for two months' play time: It's cheap therapy.

The real world often sucks, and due to very complicated societal obligations that prohibit killing people, smashing vault doors, and eradicating endangered species, we will accumulate a lot of stress restraining ourselves from showing displeasure at the things that bother us during the day.

If someone cuts me off in traffic and screams obscenities at me, I can't jump out and smash his car with a tire iron, but I can wait until later and log into warcraft and demolish his siege engine in Lake Wintergrasp. I can turn on the television and hear people screaming about how the world is coming to an end because of politics, but in Warcraft I can ignore one or two people and still hear what everyone else is saying just fine.

I had a wonderful episode on Wednesday, that describes this perfectly. I was in a meeting with a group of people who were giddy, nervous, and talking over their heads about management material. After a half-hour of uncomfortable and ridiculous exchanges, the presenter made a gross insult against my family. He knew better than to say what he did, but said it nonetheless, and I found it offensive enough to leave the meeting (and not smash things with a tire iron). Of course as a result I was disciplined for leaving the meeting. Feel the love.

The perfect anecdote was to log into warcraft, be given clear direction by a questgiver, and offered a non-negotiable reward. I did several of these, and started to relax. Then I joined a pick-up group in Hellfire Ramparts and healed a group through the dungeon, keeping everyone alive and healthy while we looted the place. Everyone got what they needed, and I got some compliments for my healing ability. Later, I joined an Alterac Valley battle and we battled against another army, strategizing and cooperating on the fly, and earned a strong victory.

If only more people played warcraft, they'd understand where we were coming from, and we'd have a common language to communicate with. Like when someone tells an off-color joke we can say "dude, not in guild chat please." Or if someone steals from your bank you can kick them out of your guild, and put them on your ignore list. Warcraft is honest where the real world fails, and it gives us feedback that we desire in our daily lives but never get. It heals people, and it reinforces self-worth - even in tiny amounts it at least assures you that you are not crazy.

/tireiron

Light and Shadow

Now that I'm in Outland where the gold is pretty darned good, I've got my alchemy and herbalism to Outland level, and I've pait for my flying mount, the next expense on the list is dual spec.

For those who are not familiar with dual specs, it allows you to switch back and forth (out of combat) between talent specializations. For a priest this means that sometimes I can be healing as a holy priest and sometimes I could do damage as a shadow priest.

I never really went shadow, fully. I tried it a long time ago with my original priest and was kind of disappointed at the results. I didn't kill stuff that much faster, I was still basically shield-and-cast, sit-and-drink. Looking at the shadow tree it seems that there have been some improvements made to the talents since then that should make life easier.

The one that sticks out in my mind as the best change is to Vampiric Embrace. Having it a self-buff instead of a dot that consumes a GCD and can be applied to only one target is a major improvement. It's more of a cast-and-forget benefit, which makes DPS more relaxing and less like an affliction warlock trying to juggle DoTs.

I've got about 100 gold to go before I can afford it, but either today or tomorrow I'll probably have the gold and will buy my second spec. These are the talents I'm looking at, feel free to comment on my choices:

Vacation on the Dark Side

Every once in a while, no matter how fun and smooth your life as a (insert class here) is, you feel like taking a break from it, usually to perform a different role. Tanks may decide they want to DPS, healers may feel like tanking, DPS might want to heal. Sometimes you can change your talents around to fill a different role, sometimes you can't.

My rogue is great fun. If the Cataclysm expansion came out right now I'd probably hop back on the rogue and start adventuring in the new content. But I was a little tired of DPSing, and decided I wanted to roll a priest - a class I haven't played in a long time - and I'm enjoying leveling as holy.

I asked the guild if they thought I could go from level 43 to Outland in one weekend and they laughed at me, but by the time I logged out Sunday night I was level 59 and cruising through Hellfire Peninsula. Last night I hit 60, and had the gold for my flying mount. Leveling through Outland is so much better when you can fly everywhere.

A big part of the accelerated leveling was due to grouping. I did Sunken Temple twice, Blackrock Depths about a dozen times, Uldaman and Maraudon countless times, Scarlet Monastery until I was nearly falling asleep. It was less interesting than leveling, but also less relaxing. Because when you rely on grouping for your progress... you are taking a walk on the dark side.

Everyone likes to think that they are the reasonable person in the group. You can be young, old, new, experienced, undergeared, tweaked out, doesn't matter, that is always true for every group - conflict are never your fault, it's always someone else's. And I've seen it all in the last 40 levels, anything you can possibly imagine. I don't like votekicking, but I've initiated my share. I don't like complaining, but sometimes even the most gentle soul is left with a head-spinning 'wtf??'

Why is that death knight doing terrible dps? Maybe because he's got resurrection sickness.

Why are we chain-pulling when I'm out of mana? Oh - the warlock's pet is on 'aggressive.'

Why is that hunter standing next to the boss and taking cleave damage? Because he ran out of arrows about 15 minutes ago and is melee attacking everything.

It never ends. Just when you think you've seen it all, someone shows up with their "perfectly reasonable" quirkiness and throws the whole group on its ear. The little things are easy to deal with - like druids who panic when they see the tank taking some damage and they stop doing dps to heal them (hey, that's my job - back off). When it gets more challenging is when people bring their prickly attitudes to bear on these little quirks, and a slightly inefficient run turns into a personality explosion.

Last night I had a doozy, doing Hellfire Ramparts with a death knight tank (Ramparts is tanked by DK's whether you like it or not, it's practically a law). The tank wasn't very good, but we managed. We got to the final boss and he decided that the little fire on the ground didn't look that dangerous so he decided to sit in it to keep himself warm while he tanked the boss. Unfortunately, the fire does far more damage than the boss, and armor doesn't mitigate any of it. About 20 seconds later he finally lost health faster than I could keep up with GCD's, and he died. The group wiped. Out of nowhere: "OMG HEALER YOU SUCK WTF ARE YOU DOING"

Calmly I popped open recount and linked the 23,000 damage he took from Liquid Fire, and pointed out that this was damage that he easily could have avoided.

"YOU SUCK! YOUR SO BAD I BEEN HEALED THRU THAT BEFORE"

Some things are just so awful/obscure they have no answer. Almost immediately, the DPS whispered to me to please ignore him and not leave, so we could just finish the run. I agreed, we rezzed and rebuffed.

Tank: Don't ****ing suck this time healer
Me: Don't stand in the fire this time, k?
Tank: ST*U your the worst healer ever I swear
DPS (whisper): ignore him! plz plz
Tank: btw you have shield and renew its not hard
Me: Btw, fire is red

And we proceeded to kill the boss easily. The tank decided not to stand in the fire - which reduced the healing required by about 80% - and it was a cakewalk. Won some loot, vendored it. Got some xp, yay. /Leave group, teleported out.

Then the beauty of the system - put the tank on ignore (yes, you can /ignore people from other realms) and now the LFG system will never put the two of us in the same group again. I'm sure the tank is happy about that, and I know I sure am. I took a break and stretched a little and had a glass of water before settling back in.

The next group I was in was smooth as silk and everyone was very complementary of my healing. It was a wonderful reward for tolerating the previous group, and I wished I could have added them all to my friends list.

And we all leveled happily every after.

Speaking of Quitting

I have no intention of quitting Warcraft. Once upon a time I wondered if spending hours playing a video game was a wise choice of time, but that just isn't a concern anymore. First of all, warcraft has completely replaced my television watching time. I find it highly ironic that the mainstream population that baffles at us gamer types spending hours plunking away on a keyboard has no problem opening up a 6-pack and parking their ass in front of a television for an entire afternoon.

Warcraft is easy and quick entertainment, it's an ongoing story that I am the director of, and it's really cheap. If you're not a kid - if you're a financially secure adult - 15 bucks a month isn't a big deal. I can skip a couple meals and end up saving the money, and at my age/metabolism skipping a meal here and there isn't a bad idea. It's so cheap that I plan on keeping up my subscription whether or not I choose to play.

But my subscription time has run out, so I need to head to Walmart to pick up another time card and plug it in. It's about $30, and lasts two months. I could choose to pay via credit card online, either as individual payments or through automatic billing, but I prefer to buy the card and enter the code.

I really don't know why I do this other than I suspect it fulfills some basic need to participate in a transaction in order to get the fullest satisfaction from it. Everyone in my office has direct deposit, but I still get a paper check and take it to the bank each week. The money ends up going right back in the bank most of the time, but it's the value of being part of the process that keeps me satisfied.

This is one reason why I keep playing Warcraft, and haven't transitioned to some other subscription game by now: I can buy playing time at Walmart. If City of Heroes had time cards at Walmart I might be playing that instead (especially if I could buy the Architect Edition at Walmart). Whatever MMO ends up displacing WoW, the time cards will be available at Walmart.

People forget how powerful that point of sale is for the mainstream gamer. Most people who play Warcraft don't see ads in the back of comic books or read MMO websites to know what the newest/greatest game is - if it isn't on the shelf it might as well not exist. And if you're going to charge for a subscription, you'd better sell your time cards there too or you won't get much repeat business. That's just the way it is.

But in any case, the game is so cheap that paying for maintaining my subscription is nearly independent from whether I feel like playing or not. It's a few bucks, I'll pay for it in case I decide to log on sometime this month. And if I don't, I still browse the forums a lot and like to interact there. I guess if I want to post any comments I need to re-up my subscription.

Looks like I'm skipping lunch and heading to Walmart today.

Obsolescence

Warcraft is entertainment. It's pretty cheap entertainment as far as that goes, for only $15 a month you can connect up and play as much as you want. Quite a few people have noted that the hardest part about quitting warcraft isn't the withdrawl - if you're bored with it, you don't want to play it - but the huge replacement cost of being entertained at the same level.

For $15 you can't even buy the family dinner at a fast food restaurant, or take a date to the movies. I've paid bigger late fees for movie rental before. $15 is chump change, which is what makes the "Omg, I'm outraged!" customers on the warcraft forums all the more amusing. For $15 you typically can't get anything of quality, but it will buy you a monthly access to the best MMO in the world.

But it is entertainment, and even inexpensive entertainment becomes undesirable if it isn't kept fresh. Television has done a good job of proving this for us. Warcraft has a huge world filled with entertaining activities, and to a large extent it is all replayable with different characters, but there are some things that should be changed because the game itself has changed so much over time.

Back at level 60 there were two sets of divergent changes being made to the game. On the one hand there were additional features being added to the game - battlegrounds, guild banks, etc. - and on the other hand there was additional content being created specifically for the 1-60 leveling experience. Some of these things are still fresh and fun, but some have become obsolete and should be either upgraded, or removed.

The first one that comes to mind is class quests. Back in vanilla Blizzard decided that it would be fun to add in class-specific quests (all of them requiring a visit to the Sunken Temple instance) that would add to the uniqueness of each class. For example, as a priest you need to visit ST and kill the dragon Morphaz and bring a vial of his blood back. In return you can choose between a ring, wand, or trinket. All three items are fairly worthless, and are guaranteed to be replaced in about six levels when you venture into Outland.

The concept at the time was that you would learn something about the instance, something about the lore of your class in relation to it, and you would gain an item that would help you level and possibly not be replaced until you raid at level 60. Well, these days are long gone. No one does their class questline anymore because it's pretty tedious and the rewards are really low. I would wager that more people complete this questline at 80 when they try to get the Loremaster title than people who are at-level trying to just get quests done for leveling.

It's a good concept, but the rewards don't hold up over time. The instance itself is pretty confusing and irritating - spiral stairs that overlap each other, mobs and bosses on multiple levels inside the temple, gobs of trash in small fight spaces. It feels like a parking ramp sometimes (where did we park again? which stairway goes where?) and has some sequential kill requirements that are a turn-off to casual dungeon crawlers.

Another thing that was added at level 60 was the tier 0.5 dungeon set. The tier 0 set was the blue (mostly BoP) drops from 5-man dungeons all over Azeroth, and dungeons had to be run multiple times to collect all the pieces from each to put together a set for all the bonuses. Tier 0.5 was a set of questlines added on top of that that allowed you to upgrade your gear pieces to 'light epics' that were superior to the basic dungeon set, but inferior to the raid set you could get from Molten Core.

On RP servers sometimes people will run dungeons and collect the gear and then do all the questlines to upgrade the gear just so they have a unique set they can walk around in on occasion, but no one does this stuff anymore for practical reasons. At level 58 when you can enter Outland your first quests will reward you with items that are far superior to Molten Core gear, much less tier 0.5, so it makes no sense to do this process for anything other than intrinsic reasons.

And then there's the issue of Alterac Valley. Once upon a time it was a battlefield of epic proportions, with NPCs stopping players from running willy-nilly all over the map, and battles took hours (occasionally even days!) to complete. There are a lot of people who miss that type of battle, one where lines needed to be maintained, and the fighting is mandatory instead of just being a race to PvE the opposing general.

In Cataclysm they are removing marks of honor for battlegrounds, opening up the possibility for Alterac Valley to be restored to its original state. The reason AV was reduced in difficulty was because Blizzard wanted each battleground to last about the same amount of time, so that marks were fairly equal in value, but if all the marks are eliminated then it's possible for them to restore AV to its original state. However... since they are including the Daily Battleground option in Cataclysm they probably don't want AV battles to last forever again.

Aside from class quests, tier upgrades, and battlegrounds, there are many other things created or conceptualized for level 60 that need to be updated for the L80 (L85) game in order for them to remain valuable as content. And content is king when it comes to entertainment. Updating the game makes the difference between $15 spent and a $15 bargain.

What Makes a Main?

For those who aren't fluent in Warcraft, every player is allowed 10 unique characters on any realm (server), and a total of 50 across your entire account. You can only play one at a time, of course. Of all of your characters there is probably one that is your "main", and the rest are "alts". Sometimes people will have more than one main. Sometimes people can't identify their main, they love all their alts. To make this a little clearer, I will attempt to lay out the guidelines that help you identify a "main".

First things first. When you first log in to the game, which character do you want to log in and spend time on first? Yes, you want to check your auctioneer mule, and there may be some reason why you need to see something on an alt, but most of the time you are logging in your main to check everything out and remind yourself of the things you want to get done with that character today.

Say hello. Even if there aren't any raids tonight and you don't feel like running your daily for a couple frost badges, you probably log into your main to say hey to other people and see who's online (because wow is just an interactive 3d chat client, amirite?). You may do this with ventrilo instead, but there it's even easier - the name you use on vent is often the name of your main. Your main is probably the identity you use on the forums also.

Levels. This is easy: We toy around with a lot of classes, but our main is usually our highest level character. If you only have one L80 character then it's probably your main. Given that we're over 5 years into this game, by now most experienced players have more than one L80.

Achievements. Somethings are fun to do once, but not twice. If an achievement comes up that you'd like to get done for a character, odds are there's a character you'd like to do it with in favor of your others - that one is probably your main. Your level 80 alts may be under 2000 achievement points, but your main will be over 4000, have the rare pets you found, have a bunch of titles, etc.

But... The things above are just indicators as to what your main might be. In actuality, your main is always the character you spend the most time playing. I have seven or eight level 80s (I forget atm) and two of them are highly competitive. But right now, my main is the priest I'm playing. I don't really care if my rogue progresses any further (even though it may become my main again in Cataclysm), but my priest is fun, and I'm playing it full-time. Therefore, it's my main, and I have several L80 alts.

That's it. Your main is the character you are mainly playing the most.

By All That's Holy

I've been very hard on the priest class over the past few years. I've called it the garbage class, the class you trick your little brother into playing, the warriors' training wheels, etc. I have good reason to hate the class - I leveled a holy priest in vanilla as my first character.

Back in December of 2004 the priest class was a much, much different animal than it is now. First of all, if you ask around for tips for leveling a priest today one of the first things you'll hear is 'get a good wand'. It's true, at low levels a good wand does as much damage as your smite, so there's no sense in wasting mana. Well, back in vanilla wands weren't autofire. Can you imagine trying to click-and-shoot with a wand to literally save your life? It was torture. Wands back then were a stat stick and an emergency tool.

Leveling holy - because my friends needed a healer for all their groups - meant that I didn't have the utility of discipline or the DPS of shadow, and I had to heal my way through every fight, which lasted forever. The only real benefit back then was that Inner Fire didn't run on charges, it was a cast-and-forget buff. But fights took forever, took all your mana, and if you were lucky you could fight one mob two levels above you or two mobs at the same level.

Then I got all the way to 60 and eventually our guild decided to try our hand at raiding. Now you have to understand if you haven't played a healer that there's a certain amount of guilt that comes with letting people die. You get over it eventually as you play more, but a good healer will still feel a tug of responsibility for the other players' lives even when things go wrong. Well, my first raid was a 40-man Molten Core rep run - just clearing trash - and I was the only priest in the raid.

Back then most of the healing was done by priests. I was a good one, but I couldn't keep 40 people alive, no way. Seeing 39 people die because you just couldn't pump out healing fast enough was traumatic. I decided I'd had enough, and I actually deleted my priest. I had a GM undelete it a couple months later, but I never seriously played it again. It was awful. I would be asked to heal things, I'd be a hero, then when I wanted some help with my own quests there was no one to be found to help me. I was a tool to be used to make other people enjoy the game - screw that.

So I gave up on that priest forever, and switched to other classes and loved them all. Even the hybrids that would occasionally heal, I knew that I was just a respec and a gear change away from doing something fun instead of healing someone else's adventure.

Five years later

My rogue is at 5k gear score, and it's time to play an alt. At the back of my mind I've been thinking about playing a priest again,and I finally give in and roll one. This time I make sure to give myself every advantage so the leveling process isn't painful - I buy the staff, shoulder, and chest heirlooms to give myself a 20% leveling bonus and I don't have to worry about a weapon until level 80. It's a huge difference right from the start.

Back in vanilla there was virtually no +spell on any items before level 60, and what there was was divided into two groups, +healing and +damage. In the BC expansion they combined healing and spell damage and every healer everywhere cried with joy. No longer would they have to collect two exclusive sets of gear just to be able to farm for repair bills, they could do decent damage in their healing gear. I remember the day they made the change and I took my resto druid out for a spin and giggled for hours at being able to starfire with decent damage.

Also back in vanilla the priests each had racial spells to make them unique. Dwarf priests had fear ward, which gave the Alliance a significant advantage in raiding and made Dwarf priests the preferred choice. I was a troll, so my racial was a shadow ball that did damage to things that hit me. The problem was that it only lasted three hits and it was too mana costly to maintain, so it was mostly useless. Every priest had their own special spell and I miss that uniqueness sometimes, but I wouldn't trade what we have now.

Fear Ward is now a trainable spell for every priest at low levels, and so is Devouring Plague. That gives us two dots we can pop on a target, just like warlocks. Wands are now autofire, so on a normal mob you can shield yourself (with Inner Fire up) and wand it to death, or cast Holy Fire, Smite, or Mind Blast and your mob is dead pretty quick. Even specced completely holy like I am, grinding and questing is easy beans.

And then there is the added bonus of LFD and queuing for battlegrounds from anywhere in the world. If I get into a spot where the quests are hard and I'd rather grind out xp in dungeons or mix it up with a few battlegrounds (which now also give xp) I can queue up anywhere on the fly. And priests have no movement buffs at all - no animal forms, no sprint, charge, anything - but the level requirements for mounts were nerfed down to level 20, so your priest won't have to walk everywhere forever.

All together the priest class has changed a little, but the game has changed a lot in ways that don't punish healers for their class choice as much as it did back in vanilla. If you had thought about playing a healer sometime and weren't sure what it would be like, it's a better time than ever - jump in and roll a priest.

Can't get no Satisfaction

Here I go again, focusing on a new character. I have no idea how long I'll be able to stick with it considering it's a priest, which is the lamest, gimpiest, most garbage class in WoW. Priest is the class you trick someone else into playing so you can get healed while you play a class that's actually fun.

I bought the heirloom staff, shoulders, and chest for the priest and it's still leveling at a crawl. I must have died at least 20 times already because I can barely handle one mob two levels above me, much less two. I'm level 12 right now, with only three more levels to go until I can level up via LFD and PvP full-time. But it's taking... forever... to get there. Westfall is a horrible zone to level in, I hate it with a passion.

The rogue was fun while I played it, but in 5k gear I'm only doing 4k dps in raids. That's manageable, but not great. I think I'm probably capped out at what I can do for now. I was just getting used to mutilate with daggers and the higher DPS weapons dropped that I needed to respec to combat to use, and I just don't care for combat much. The assassination tree has more in it for me, and my rotation was pretty manageable.

And there's not many upgrades left for the rogue without raiding, which I don't enjoy. It sucks up too much time, and I refuse to play in a manner that makes it impossible to talk with my wife and kids. So, the rogue is done.

Now if I can just figure out a way to stomach the next three levels on the priest... maybe I should head over to the Draenei territory and knock out a few quests there.

Don't be an Armory Orphan

If you haven't been over to the warcraft armory site in a while - wowarmory.com - make sure that you do. A couple of things are hidden that were once visible, but there is a huge new addition. Your character, complete with armor and weapons, is now rendered in the browser exactly as it will appear in-game.

And you can tell the difference right away of which characters are truly loved by their players and which aren't. A normal player doesn't bother checking his armory very much and only uses it for reference. If you really love your character though it's just fun to look at it, and you will have a custom pose set up for it to appear the way you want.

My rogue, for example, is looking off-screen to the right in a crouched position ready to dodge any incoming attacks. I could zoom in our out on him, have an animation play, rotate him to any angle, etc. It's pretty fun to play with. But you can tell who's got a passion for their character, he's not just standing there, he's animated.

It Only Takes One

I've been trucking along at 80 for a couple weeks now gearing up my rogue, and he's finally gotten to the point where he can do steady heroic-level DPS for... heroics. I'm still enjoying this guy enough that I'm less interested in rolling another alt than I expected I would be. I actually got to a low point, said to myself 'time to roll an alt' out of habit, then decided not to. Playing at 80 is still fun, which is a feeling I haven't felt in a while.

I did Wintergrasp a bunch of times this weekend and the closest I got to winning was on my Alliance paladin on Cho'Gall, which we never win. On Wyrmrest Accord - even though we supposedly outnumber the Horde - we win only a couple times a week. The faction is great, people are nice and the economy is fairly healthy, but when it comes to PvP people just can't get motivated to participate. Someday, maybe.

But I did a ton of heroics. My DPS is still not great but it's improving, and I discovered that Envenom is a pretty slick ability. I was rolling along with a whole bunch of good groups all weekend, then got one bitchy tank for Culling of Stratholme.

Arthas rolls up and sets into his narrative, etc., and the tank says 'so you didn't bypass the beginning huh?' I tell him 'guess not', and then he accuses me of talking to the 'gnome dude', which sets the narrative in motion. Now I don't know if the narrative can be bypassed or not, but I didn't talk to any NPCs. And the 'gnome dude' is Chromie, I know who that is. So he accuses me, and I deny it. He says he saw me do it, I told him he's mistaken. He says 'then it must have been a different rogue named Diagnose'. Finally I'm fed up with the accusations: 'Yeah, whatever. Just tank.'

So even though I was cheerful going in and laid out a Great Feast for people to share before we pulled, suddenly I'm on the poop list of the tank, for doing nothing. Awesome. The run is very quiet even with the stops in between, and there's a good chance the tank is talking shit in whispers to the other players. Yeah, we know how this is going to end. Second to the last boss has the potential to drop the plate armor that the tank wants. We kill the boss easily, it doesn't drop. Tank quits the group, two other players drop with him immediately.

Hey, that's your right if that's how you want to play it. You were certain that I did something that I didn't do, and you decided to be a jerk in return. Grats. And no matter how many good heroics I had with nice groups all weekend, I'm left wondering what I'd done to piss this guy off, and why bother playing if all I can aspire to is to end up grouped with jerks who can blow up our groups because they get their panties in a bunch.

So I think maybe I should step away from grouping a bit and try to solo for a while. Maybe roll an alt. I log in an alt, take a look at the starting zone, and log out again. Yuck, I don't have an appetite for that right now. So now between jerks and Wintergrasp I'm wondering why I play at all. Jokers to the left of me, clowns to the right.

I log out for a minute, and take out the dog. Bag up the garbage. Get a glass of water. Watch some of the closing ceremonies for the Olympics. Oh my god, a giant inflatable moose! Log back in, do an Alterac Valley. I love AV, it has magical healing properties, even when we lose. I queue for another heroic, and everyone is cheerful and sweet as pie, and they're all happy to be there. Suddenly, I love playing again.

I guess sometimes it only takes one group to bring you down, or lift you back up. I've got to make a mental note: The jerks are never worth worrying about. And I put the tank on ignore, so we'll never end up in a group together again.