Not Dead!

18. June 2013 · Write a comment · Categories: Real Life

I know it has been a while since I last posted. I have been suffering through a nasty bout of depression for the past month and a half, so I have had nothing nice to say.  And then I just got busy and still had nothing good to say, so I’ve been silent.  So, I feel like writing so let’s pick this up shall we?

Since May, a lot of things have happened.  I picked up raiding on my shaman, well kind of.  I’ve done a few Openraid.us pugs and got into a alt raid night in another guild on Blade’s Edge.  And the most interesting thing, I’ve switched servers.  My little guild is now over on Hyjal, where I am happily raiding and pugging and doing all kinds of awesome things.  (Did you know it’s possible to have more then 15 people in the Shrine of Two Moons at one time??)

Anyway.  Let’s talk about my shaman first shall we?  Husband had been going to school on Tuesdays and Thursdays.  (He’s finished now, and is taking an online class that starts next Monday the 24th.)  So I had all this spare time to do things so I decided I’d gear up my little shaman and start healing raids with her.  Well, the Open Raid pug that I joined with carried me along, which I appreciate.  And let me soak up some gear.  And then I went into ToES with the raid group that I was actually meaning to raid with.  It was pretty awful.  The raid leader/disc priest talked to me like I was stupid and had never healed before.  And I was matching her effective healing, with her 20+ ilevels over me.  I looked over the logs later and she never used Spirit Shell or whatever that awesome AOE shield spell is.  It was very sad.  We’ve not had a chance to raid since.  We’ll see how it goes this week.

I am having a lot of fun healing on my shaman.  She’s interesting and very adorable!

Which brings me to our move to Hyjal.  Over the last few months, it’s been apparent that Blade’s Edge is slowly dying.  We were having a hard time pugging people and most of the higher progressed guilds transferred off server, one at a time.  So, a dialogue was opened on our guild webpage and 4 servers were put forth as possible places we could ‘land’.  There was 2 Horde (one PVP and one PVE) and 2 Alliance (one PVP and one PVE).  We chose the PVE Horde server.

Not everyone is happy with the move.  But overall, I’m really glad we did it.  We’ve already picked up a new warrior.  We haven’t a warrior since Cataclysm I think.  I’m excited to get back into heroics.  We’ve been unable to do them for the last few weeks since we keep missing people.  But now, hopefully, we’ll pick up new people and keep progressing!

I’ve been leveling my mage in my off time, which reminds me.  I transferred over my mage, my druid and my priest so far to the new server.  Eventually I’ll send over my paladin and my shaman I think.  Unless I want to keep the shaman raiding on Blade’s Edge.  Which I’m unsure about right now.

But, that’s life right now.  Moving forward.  I think :)

PSA – Spread Out for the love of the Earthmother

08. May 2013 · 1 comment · Categories: Raiding - General

Hi, I’m Karegina, your friendly neighborhood tree.  I’d like to bring something to your attention that you might not know about, distance.

Distance can be many things.  It can be emotional, it can be spatial.  It can have a maximum and it can have a minimum.  But one thing that you always need to be aware of is that it exists.

Some encounters in World of Warcraft require that you be aware of distance.  And there are even helpful add-ons that will show you the ‘safe’ zone around you for various fights.  THESE ADD-ONS WILL EVEN AUTO ADJUST THE SIZE OF DISTANCE YOU NEED TO BE CONCERNED ABOUT!

Why then, do I find 90% of players pretend they don’t know what distance is?  When I’m in any sort of raid, I am constantly being crowded by ranged, healers and sometimes even melee.  I do know that I have beautiful leaves and that I’m pretty but if you stand on me then I will wilt and die.  Trees need their breathing room too.

The only times I want to hug you is when the game mechanic calls for it.  At that time, please come and stand under my leafy branches.  I will use them to protect and nurture you.  However, when I am done with you, go away.  I am fickle like a cat (which is one of my shapeshifting forms) so only come to me when I want you.

So, for the love of the Earthmother, think about where you stand.  Don’t group up on people when you should be spreading out.  You are just spreading the bad around more so it makes you harder to heal.  And don’t you love your healers?  Don’t you want them to flourish and be happy?  We want you to prosper but you can’t prosper if we are dead.  Remember that.

This has been a PSA on behalf of Karegina’s limited sanity.

General WoW Life Musings

08. May 2013 · Write a comment · Categories: Achievements, Alts - Priest, Gear, Raiding - Throne of Thunder, Rep Grinds, Screenshots

My WoW life has been pretty good the last few days.  Well, I think that my overall life has been pretty good the last few days and I’ve just had RNG on my side in WoW.  This past weekend, my guild downed Lei Shen after working on him for about 1 night.  (All Sunday until about 20 minutes before raid ended and part of Saturday, late.)  Since I’d only seen it one time in LFR, I think I did a pretty good job of staying out of the bad, not dying, etc.

I did end up raging at my computer however.  And as is always the case, since it was progression, I ended up in a fight with Husband.  (Sometimes he needs to be less a raid leader and more of a supportive husband.  Seriously.)  But, we downed Lei Shen and our guild turned everyone into druid trees so we could all be awesome together.

lei shen

In my spare time, I ground out the Tranquillien rep to exalted so I could get closer to ‘The Beloved’ and I started doing the Netherwing daily quests.  THOSE SUCK and I hate Crossrealm zones for this. :P   SUCKS SUCK SUCKS.  I’m also working on Skyguard and ummmm, Orgrila.  (I hated those guys in BC.  I hate them now too.)

So, that was my weekend.  Monday, Husband went camping (he’s on vacation) and I stayed home alone.  I ended up at a friend’s house for dinner and then came home to play a little WoW before bed.  It was so exciting that I ended up falling asleep around 11pm, with How I Met Your Mother on the tv in our bedroom.  WOO.

Tuesday, however, kicked some serious ass.  I logged on at 6pm pacific time and got an immedate whisper “Wanna come to LFR 3 and 4?” HELL YEAH!  So, off to Llane I went and we did Nalek, then the 3rd LFR.  Lots of gold treasure bags were handed out by the bosses.  And then off to the 4th one.  Where I got a Primal Egg and Lei Shen’s shiny healy trinket.  (WOO!)  Best part?  We one shot Lei Shen.  Despite a third of our raid leaving after Twins.

So, I get out of there and start flipping around to do my transmutes and my farms, etc.  And what do I see?  A 5 proc of Living Steel.  YAY!  At this point, I didn’t know what to do with myself.  So, I hopped onto my priest and started doing August Celestial Dailies and the farm part.  Then suddenly, achievement and my priest can make big bags!  I had the stuff to make 6 of them right away, so I got myself 4 and Husband got 2.  (Seriously, happy wedding anniversary darling, you’d best get me something awesome.  You have a week.)

So, I went to bed feeling really awesome about my WoW life.  Let’s hope this feeling continues for a while.  I’d like to feel good about it instead of having rage fits when people come and stand in my little green bubble of ‘GTFO’ in the AOE damage fights.  (SERIOUSLY GUYS SPREAD OUT!!!)

Anyone else having an awesome WoW life?

Musings on Competition

02. May 2013 · Write a comment · Categories: Gear, Raiding - General, Story Time

I am a very competitive person.  And I don’t like that about myself.  I am a sore loser and an even worse winner.  As a result of this, I don’t like to do things that put myself in direct competition with anyone.  This means that I avoid board games like the plague (much to the sadness of my husband and one of my best friends).  I find board games to be repetitive and slow.  I hate waiting for other people to take their turn and will lose interest as soon as I start to lose.  (There is still discussion of an ‘epic’ game of Risk that I ended up winning because I got depressed and ‘limp hand rolled’ my way to victory.)

This also insures that I dislike DPS-ing under most circumstances because I am not at the top of the game there.  There is always someone better than me and that rankles me a bit.  Oh, I will DPS as my raid leader requires but I much prefer healing because (to be entirely honest) that is a fight against myself (and sometimes the stubbornness of the other people on my raid team).

While it bothers me a bit to not be on top of the healing meters sometimes, I don’t get as worked up over that as I did when I was DPS-ing.  Healing meters, while fun sometimes, aren’t always a great way of judging how ‘good’ you are doing.  Is your raid dying?  No?  Then you’re doing fine.

This competitive streak of mine gets me in trouble if I feel that my guild is in direct competition with another guild for progression.  I start cyber stalking the other guild’s Wow Progress page and looking at ilevels for their druids to compare to my own ilevel.  I start to judge myself based on how good the OTHER guild is doing.  And if I feel like I’m better than them, I start to get snooty and stuck up.

Just recently, there was a guild who transferred off our server.  For reasons that I don’t want to explain, I felt that they were direct competition to my guild and every week when I would see they weren’t progressing, I would rejoice in the idea that they sucked that bad.

I don’t like that feeling.  I don’t like being THAT person.  I understand that a little competition is healthy but I feel that I take it to unhealthy levels and I try to avoid that at all costs.

This is also a main reason that I don’t PVP.  I don’t like that direct competition between the teams.  (It doesn’t help that I’m really bad at it.)  I will go into battlegrounds as needed for PVE things, but it’s a rare occasion that I will willing go into one just for the ‘joy’ of PVP.

I end up being an unpleasant person when put in competitive situations.   And since I am a people pleaser, I don’t like being that unpleasant person.  So I make sure that I’m not put into those situations.

 

Self-Esteem and WoW

30. April 2013 · Write a comment · Categories: 12 to 90, Alts - Shaman, Raiding - Throne of Thunder, Real Life

Last night, as I was drifting off to sleep, I was thinking about all the things I’ve been doing in-game recently.  I managed to get my goblin shaman (who started out life as an orc and apparently had a weird engineering mishap) to 90 last night with my favorite enhancement shaman.  (He grouped with me and ran me around Dread Wastes killing the things I pointed him at so I could level faster.)

I also realized that today is my 1 year anniversary of self hosting and being Ysera’s Daughter instead of a Reluctant Raider.  So happy kinda blogaversary to me?  I think?

Anyway.  Myth is currently 9/12 in Throne of Thunder.  And these last two weeks have been interesting.  Two weekends ago, our holy paladin ended up having to miss a majority of our raid due to family things.  So I ended up healing with our elemental shaman who has a resto spec.  Now, our elemental shaman hasn’t really healed anything in a long time and doesn’t have the best gear for resto.  So, we went into ToT and managed to get to Durumu with minimal problems.

However, our poor resto shaman was only pumping out around half of my healing.  And our DPS were doing some stupid things and taking a lot of damage.  I actually ended up ranking on Horridon that night.  And ya know what, it was refreshing to sit there and SHOW my guild what a good resto druid can do.  I haven’t been able to perform to my best ability since we have a good mitigation healer there every week.

This past week, on Tortos, we were doing our usual thing and about a third of the way through the fight, one of our best dps dies (our warlock) and then our holy paladin dies.  We’d already used the battle rez on the tank so we couldn’t get them up and yet we proceeded to down the boss.

The holy paladin said “I just want to say we have one of the best resto druids.”  And the rest of the group agreed and I glowed with pride and happiness.  I need these kind of atta-girls.  (Husband uses a very crude term to describe the constant praise I seem to need but I won’t repeat it here.)

As I believe most girls have been, I grew up being told over and over again that I was worthless and stupid.  (When I was 17, I went to a garage sale in the cul-d-sac behind my house and surprised the owners of the house when I introduced myself.  They thought I was the dog because of the way my step-father screamed and berated me.  My ex-step-father is an ass and one of the root causes of my emotional insecurities.)  Discovering that I was good at healing gave me self-esteem and caused me to be able to build myself up outside of the game.  (I now know that I’m a damn good mortgage processor and can accept that because I was able to accept that I was good at a silly video game.)

I guess I’m trying to say that sometimes you find the silliest things to build yourself up with and when you aren’t able to show yourself to the best of your abilities, sometimes that messes with your head a little.  I’m thankful that the holy paladin wasn’t able to show up that weekend and that he died on a healing intensive fight.  It let me shine like the sun for a short period of time and remind my guild just how lucky they are to have me with them.  And remind me that they are a good complement for my playing style.  No matter how much I scream and yell at my monitor when they stand in the bad and drop lightning balls in the water places on Jin’rokh!

“Free” Time

25. April 2013 · Write a comment · Categories: Alts - Alliance, Real Life, Story Time

Hello, my name is Karegina, and I have not done any LFRs in at least two weeks.

It’s like this you see, Husband and I had been going with Iron Circle’s Tuesday LFR group (who are awesome fun) but Husband has recently gone back to college to finish up his 2 year degree.  (He only has 3 classes to finish in order to get 3 different 2 year degrees.)  The class he is taking this term meets in the evenings on Tuesdays and Thursdays.  Which means that he can’t go to the Tuesday LFR group.

What that means for me is that I, who get off work at 5pm, don’t have dinner waiting for me when I walk in the door at 5-7 minutes before 6pm (which is when the LFR raid starts).  And boy howdy, I am starving when I get home from work.  I don’t even have time to grab a quick snack to chew on because if I wanted to go, I’d have to go straight to my desk to log on, since I don’t have Husband to be already logged on to tell anyone that I’m going to be right there.

This is Husband’s 4th week of class and he’s enjoying it a lot.  Me, not so much.  See, I’m used to having a partner to play with and do dailies with.  Now, I have been spending a LOT of my time watching TV shows on Netflix and leveling alts.  (I just got a human monk to level 51 or 52.)

I’m caught in between virtual rock and a hard place.  These days (since the weather is becoming so nice) I don’t get to see Husband every night for very long.  He enjoys playing tennis and as soon as the weather gets warm enough (and light enough) he wants to be out on the courts with his tennis buddy.  So, Monday he played tennis until about 7:45pm.  Tuesday he had class, Wednesday we were together hanging out, tonight he has class again and then from what I understand, tomorrow he’s going to go play tennis again.

With my anxiety, I have a hard time going by myself anywhere in game to do an LFR (especially the new one that I’ve not done yet) or any LFDs on my main.  Dailies bore me because they take me sooooo long to do (I have a healer mind set so I tend to pull one at a time, even if I could take more) and I don’t really have anyone else to ‘play’ with while Husband is off doing his own thing.

I figured that maybe getting out of the house would help get me out of this slump, but after 1 yoga class, I haven’t been back because of an unexpected dishwasher expense.  (Homeownership is just the best thing EVER.)  I’ve thought about spending time pulling weeds after work but unless I have pretty flowers or herbs or veggies to tend, the idea of pulling weeds for a couple of days just leaves me cold.

So I have all this ‘free’ time and I don’t know where to spend it.  Finals for Husband are in mid June, so I have about another month and a half of this.  What will happen during the summer is anyone’s guess.  But I’m expecting more tennis.  I am a tennis widow.

So, if any of you see a lonely moocow online tonight, maybe send her a whisper.  She is too shy to impose herself on anyone else.

Turnabout is Fair Play

24. April 2013 · Write a comment · Categories: Story Time

In another world, long ago, I was not a healer.  In the time before World of Warcraft, when invited to play any kind of graphical multiplayer game (like Neverwinter Nights or Dungeon Siege), I would pick out the strongest, most reckless melee class and just wade into battle.  In Neverwinter Nights, I played a Barbarian.  In Dungeon Siege, I played whatever the fighter class was.

Until World of Warcraft, I hated the way that magical combat and healing was done.  (Hell, I don’t even play a healer in pen and paper RPGs because I dislike that so much.)  I preferred the much ‘simpler’ way of a button-mashing, face-rolling fighter.

In our adventures, my husband, our best friend and myself would team up to run whatever campaign the game offered.  Husband played a hunter in Dungeon Siege and some other kind of ranged class in Neverwinter Nights.  Our best friend always played a mage.  And this would be the general scenario:

We would start out the game together.  Exploring and fighting, having a great time.  Then suddenly, I would outdistance them because they would spend their time looting the corpses as I ran ahead to kill more mobs.  Then they would end up with bags full and would ‘hearth’ back to the town to unload and I would end up dead in the bottom of some dungeon because I didn’t realize that they had left me by myself.

This happened so many many times that our best friend just stopped even fighting and would just load up his bags, return to town and then come back to repeat the process.  Husband would try to keep me in his sights but since I didn’t realize that they weren’t following me like sheep, I’d always end up dead somewhere, surrounded by about 20 mobs.

When I started playing WoW. the fact that the rogue was a melee class was a big draw for me.  I liked rogues and the whole “Hell yeah I like loot” mindset.  My real life friends were surprised I choose a rogue over a warrior but whatever.  Rogues could hold TWO daggers and that was just awesome.

When Husband and Best Friend started to play WoW, Husband picked a Shaman and Best Friend rolled a Mage (neither choice was a surprise to me).  What did surprise me, later, was when Husband picked up a Paladin and made her a tank.  Now HE was the one running headlong into danger and expecting the rest of the group to follow him.  (Well, he did that on his Shaman too, but we had the option of letting him die during those times.)

it is now years later.  Best Friend plays a Warrior but still has his beloved Mage.  Husband is still playing his very beloved Tankadin.  And refuses to run a dungeon at anything less than a flat-out sprint.  He chain pulls like a mad man.  And today I realized why he does it.

He does it to get back at me for the years of running face first into virtual danger with no way to save me.  Well played sir.  Well played.

How (Not) to Leave a Guild

20. April 2013 · 4 comments · Categories: Story Time

I am not one of those people who can be friends with their ex.  Now, I don’t have a lot of ex’s to be friends with, but the theory still stands.  I tend to be one of the people who nukes things from orbit and then salts the ground so nothing will grow there ever again.  It’s just my nature.  (Please note, before my husband and I got together, I had exactly 1 serious boyfriend and 1 ‘dude I called my boyfriend but never actually talked to’.  All my other ‘boyfriends’ were from when I was in 7th grade and I really don’t think that counts.)

Over time, I have discovered that my tendency towards total obliteration also applies to things like MUDs and WoW guilds.  If I’m going out, I’m going to take as many people as I can down with me.  When I left the MUD that Husband and I played for 5 years, I made so many enemies that I’m sure if I ever decided to visit Germany, there would be a picture of my face with a big red X over it with “DO NOT ADMIT THIS WOMAN”.  (The MUD was based in Germany and I made a lot of enemies in the Administration of that place.)

When I started playing WoW, I decided that I needed to ‘behave’ myself and not make as many enemies.  This lasted until my first massive bipolar mood swing.  The guild I was in had no idea what was going on and I ended up making some pretty powerful in-guild/on-server enemies.  At the time, I had no idea that I was bipolar, we (I.E everyone in my life) thought I was just massively moody.  I ended up Horde side at that time, as the only friends that I did had who ‘understood me’ had left the game.

In my new Horde guild, I was fine.  For a while.  But then, my mood swings started to take over and I pretty much alienated everyone until I finally escaped back to Alliance (after I found a friend of mine on a different server.)  I got my bipolar diagnosis and was put on meds that quickly regulated my moods and made me a much different (and likeable) person.

This was what it was like during the days of Burning Crusade.  I was happy and people liked me.  I was charming and social.  However, after my husband and friends joined me, I decided that maybe the guild I was in wasn’t the right fit.  So I left a joined a raiding guild with another one of my friends.  I was in it for less than 24 hours when my friend and a large portion of the raid team I had joined to raid with /gquit and formed their own guild.  At that point, I said “Screw this” and went to join another raiding guild on the server.

I raided with them for a few months, but I missed raiding with my husband and my friends, so one night at 2 am, I stealth /gquit and joined the raiding guild that they had all joined a month or so earlier.  That guild lasted for about another week or so, and then we all reformed to make the guild that I would spend all of Wrath and most of Cataclysm in.

My /gquit from that guild was horrid.  It was drama filled and drawn out and I honestly regret that I hurt the people that I hurt in dragging it out so long.  All throughout my time with that guild, I’d be fine, then a walking drama bomb.  When my medication was working, I was a nice person to be around.  But when they had to change it up, or it just randomly stopped working, I would end up becoming completely irrational and the only people who could stand to deal with me were my real life friends.  And that was only because they knew it was because I was not medicated properly.

Looking back, I can understand why people treated me the way they did.  I’m not easy to understand or even like when I’m sick.  My husband is very supportive of me (because he has to be, that whole in sickness and in health thing) and my real life friends, the one who knew me before, are also supportive.

Now, I have no plans to leave my guild.  (Rest assured Yuush, we’re not leaving.)  But I was thinking today (in the long 4 hours between lunch time and getting off work) that I don’t keep in touch with my former guildies.  They don’t want to keep in touch with me and (as I’m generally storming off in a huff of some kind) I don’t want to keep in touch with them.  The people I do feel sorry for are those left in my wake, my husband, my shaman bestie and her husband.  The people I care about the most in the world.

This post was supposed to be funny.  Kinda of a ‘Hahaha, look at the stupid things I’ve done in the past”.  However, it got me to thinking and now it’s more serious.  Sorry people.  Apparently I’m just introspective these days.

 

Raid Mechanic Thoughts

19. April 2013 · Write a comment · Categories: Raiding - General

Some days I believe that I have played this game for too long.  I started sometime in August after launch, so 2005, and have played (with no real breaks) since.  (Taking a few days here or there to go on a vacation does not count.)  I have not raided all this time, but I do know that raiding is what has kept me playing the game.

Due to various medication & brain chemistry related things, I have a very bad memory.  If you were to ask me what I was doing a year ago, I could give you a general idea (I know I was raiding DS) but I can’t remember the things that are important to me, like who was on my raid team.

However, I have trained myself to do raid encounters with my poor memory skills.  When Blizzard first came up with the idea for achievements and then, later, for heroics raids, I was so mad.  Poor little me, with a bad memory, how was I supposed to remember the differences between the encounters?

I had always used Deadly Boss Mods, but I tried not to rely on it because add-ons always end up breaking at some point and the last thing I wanted to do is rely on something, only to have it break in the middle of a boss fight.  Eventually, I would achieve some kind of ‘muscle memory’ for the boss fights.  In fact, if you dropped me back into Naxx at level 80, I could probably do the fights using my ‘raid reflexes’.

I have come to the conclusion that not all people have ‘raid reflexes’.  I have a feeling that because I am aware of the difficulty in which my mind retains game mechanics, I work harder at it then most people.  A 12 (or 25, if you choose to look at heroics + extra boss as separate instances) boss raid means that I will spend hours going over the fights on YouTube and on any kind of strategy guides.

I hated MSV, HoF and ToES because of all the different mechanics I had to learn.  (I’m STILL not clear on the Protectors fight in ToES, if you have me do it any other way then Elite, I get so confused.)  However, I believe that my fellow raiders would tell you that I appear to pick up on mechanics rather quickly.

I know that I’ve mentioned before my dislike of LFR and how people try to strong-arm mechanics instead of working with them.  Blizzard put the mechanics in the game for you to use as part of the fun (if you want to call it that) of raiding.  Overpowering the encounter and simply using your dps to blast through things doesn’t equate to a raid to me.  While it was frustrating, I enjoyed that Lei Shi in ToES was hard for us as healers all the way through when 5.2 dropped.  It was a crap shoot if a tank would die on that last round of water elementals.  The tanks had to chain their abilities just so, the healers had to do the same and sometimes the dps wouldn’t get a CC off.  All kinds of things could go wrong and despite the fact that we were pretty well geared (not heroic level but at least decently), it was still hard.

I also loved working on Spirit Kings heroic in MSV.  If you screwed up the mechanics on that one, you’d just wipe the raid.  Yes, we didn’t get it down before 5.2 and we put in a LOT of attempts but it was a mechanic heavy fight that you couldn’t just throw more healers at to heal the damage.  You had to work WITH the mechanics and dispel or stun as required.

When I do the mechanics correctly, I feel like my character is doing an elaborate dance with the boss.  Step here, heal here, move here, cooldown here.  Learning that dance makes me feel graceful, despite being a giant moocow thing.  When I dodge out of a line of fire or a rock fall (that then hits my fellow raiders), I feel good about myself.  That I have good raid awareness, despite keeping track of 10 people’s health bars.

So, those are my thoughts on raid mechanics.  This was sparked off a post that Restokin did, if you haven’t read it, I suggest you head over there and check it out.

For the Horde?

19. April 2013 · 3 comments · Categories: Story Time

When I started playing WoW, I rolled a gnome rogue.  The friend who started me playing was a night elf rogue so I, of course, joined the Alliance and since I had previously played a gnome in a D&D campaign, gnome was the ONLY choice.  I played on the Alliance side for a good year or so before the circle of friends I ran with ended up quitting the game or leaving the server.  At that time, I decided to go play with my brother-in-law on the Horde side.

I had previously made an undead warlock to play with him, but I ended up rerolling an undead mage.  I got her to level 60 before Burning Crusade and also rolled my beloved druid, who I got to the early 30′s.  Both of them spent some time in WSG because if you didn’t have a PVP title on my server at that time, you were utter crap.  (Karegina is a Scout and Annanda is a Sergeant.)

I love the Horde.  I found their storyline (at the time) to be much more interesting than the Alliance storyline.  I loved Thrall, I loved Cairne, I even loved the Banshee Queen.  I was indifferent to the plight of the trolls, in fact, I don’t think I rolled one until Cataclysm came out and I could be a warlock and druid.  But I was a true lover of the Forsaken and the Tauren.

I ended up going back to the Alliance during the Burning Crusade because I found out where one of my friends rerolled and that is where me and Husband leveled together for the first time.  And we ended up in our 50′s before a group of our real life friends joined us and we rerolled Horde.

I’ve never looked back.

Until now.

As everyone knows, when Thrall stepped down and Garrosh took over, the Horde started to change.  And as it continues to change in Mists, I find myself wondering if this is the Horde I want to be a part of.  During Cataclysm, I was wary and unhappy with the way Garrosh was leading.  However, the storyline in Stonetalon Mountains tried to show to me that Garrosh maybe did have a heart.

However, as I progress through the story line in Mists, I want to (as my best friend says) throw off my Horde affiliation and beat my fists against the door of the Shado-Pan Monastery and beg them to let me in.

In real life, I have a large Horde sticker on the back of my minivan.  I have had varied reactions to this sticker.  It’s been spit on, cheered at, waved at, cursed at and flipped off.  The positive has way out weighed the negative (maybe I live in a Horde dominated area?) but dear lord, I actually considered taking it off my van the other day after finishing the Jaina Proudmoore book.

I’ve been reading the Know Your Lore’s that Wow Insider does.  I have done the Isle of Thunder scenarios and all the dailies.  I’ve done the Dominance Offensive quests as well.  I have seen Lor’themar Theron go to someone I considered girly and worthless to being a bad ass.  And now, I’m waiting NOT VERY PATIENTLY for the chance to storm MY OWN CAPITAL CITY and remove a power-hungry mad orc from the head of my faction.

I’ve not seen a lot of spoilers from 5.3.  I’m trying to keep it under wraps so it will be a surprise for me.  However, the few I have seen got me angry.  I won’t talk about them here, but what in the HELL is Garrosh thinking?

The Alliance has always had the infighting, see Malfurion and Staghelm or the dwarves, but the Horde has always been so nice and close.  Even the Banshee Queen knows that it’s in her best interest to play along with the rest of the group.  (She just keeps her own agenda under wraps.)  But Garrosh tried to kill Vol’jin (I understand that it’s murky if it was planned or something the assassin did on his own), did kill Cairne (yes, on accident via poison from that traitorous bitch) and openly threatens the rest of the Horde to keep them in line.

When it was announced that Garrosh would be a boss in the last raid, I was happy.  I didn’t like him then but to be honest, I had no idea how they would go about bringing this raid to fruition.  Now that it’s coming around, I say it can’t happen soon enough and please bring that raid time here faster.  Or just send me forward in time so I can kick his ass.

My tauren heart just can’t take it anymore.  Don’t make me ashamed to yell For the Horde.

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