DRAMA

First I must apologize: I've had a general malaise hanging over me and just haven't felt like writing. This simple post has taken me over three days to complete. Maybe I'm coming down with some kind of holiday bug or WoW ennui? In any case, I appreciate you coming here and taking the time to read my works, even if you're all lurkers and never comment. On to the Post.

Every since my guild decided to really focus on end-game progression there has been problems and grumbling within the guild. We've had a smattering of /gquits and a lot of screaming in private channels on vent.

In part it is these 25-man teams that just seems to be made to exclude people, in part it is the fact that no one seems to be able to agree on raiding nights, I'm sure there are other reasons, but it seems like everyone was on edge for quite awhile. And then something happened; it was the kind of thing that, depending upon the reaction, could pull the guild apart or make it more cohesive. Luckily, the latter came about and, at least for a little while, end-game raiding complaining quieted down.

What happened? you ask. Well, I'll tell ya.

My Guild does not use the DKP system, we use the Suicide Kings, which is basically a list. The person on the top of the list has the first shot at the loot, if they take it, they drop to the bottom of the list and everyone else moves up.

This story involves a well respecting member of the guild, funny, good at his role, a favorite of the officers, a class leader and the designated disenchanter of Tokens for his class.

A T4 shoulder token dropped and no one requested it, so this person, who was at the very top of the Suicide Kings list, took the token in order to DE it.

So he turned in the token for gear and then, instead of disenchanting it just sent two void crystals to the Guild Bank AND THEN SHOWED UP THE NEXT NIGHT FOR THE RAID IN HIS NEW T4 SHOULDERS. So in essence he took the gear without suiciding himself down the list.

As punishment, the Guild Leader and officers present made him DE the gear then and there and then suicided him to the bottom of the list and asked him to leave the raid.

Many people in the guild thought this was too lenient as the guild charter says that any "Ninja" type move will be grounds for expulsion from the guild.

Of course, this was just the Officers' first reaction they had not had a chance to debate the issue they continued to have a very somber raid night.

When the incident was revisited and discussed amongst the membership and officers a decision to /gkick was decided, even though the culprit claimed all along that all he wanted to do was just "check out" the shoulders, however, his protest rang silent and his regardless of his motives his actions really rocked the guild.

In the end, he quit before he could be kicked, but in a final goodbye on the forums he never owned up to the fact that he did something wrong... in fact, he claimed he was /gquiting because he felt he had been treated unfairly (by being made to DE the item and then be suicided to the bottom of the list).

This was a likable, funny, person who in leaving the guild in such spectacular fashion, he brought such pain and angst that he actually brought us all together... at least momentarily.

Sticking it to Your Allies

Let’s all admit this right here and now... there are more people in our guild, in our party, in our raid on the trade channel, etc that we just want to gank, than there will ever be on the opposite side of the server.

As a hunter we have a wonderful tool called Misdirection, in which we can put aggro onto anyone in our party or raid. I usually like the people I play with, so I only jokingly announce that I am casting misdirection on the healers, but there have been rare instances where I just want to send a whole bunch of MoBs against an annoying mage, warlock, rogue or priest just because I can. So far, I have controlled those urges, but maybe one day I will follow through on that threat.

However, I feel it will be ultimately unsatisfying… why? Because while misdirection is nice, you’re not shoving that knife blade into the toon yourself, and it seems only fair that you should be able to do that.

The other day, in the chat channel, I saw someone write, “Hunters are useless I always kick them out of any party I am in.” I started to write in response, “Misdirection on …” but then I remembered I was on my level 30 shaman and that wouldn’t make sense, plus other hunters said a few things, nothing as threatening as I was going to write, but they defended the class nicely.

On a related note, I was farming Netherdragon Scales up in Netherstorm and it is just strange to be attacking M0Bs that are green. They walk by you; they say “Hey how’s it going? Thanks for defending us down there in Shadowmoon.”
“My pleasure, you gave me a great mount for doing so,” And then you send your pet on them, kill them and skin them for their dragon scales… it seems rather heartless.

ZA, 2.3 QQ, etc.

Man, it's been a hell of a week.

The meeting at work went great... thinks for asking.

Since I had to work late on Tuesday, in my downtime, I grabbed the laptop that is pre-loaded with WoW, updated it with the patch, got on-line made my [Quiver of a Thousand Feathers] put 100 feathers up on the AH (at 40 gold a stack), did the cooking quest and stationed myself at the Light's Hope Chapel and logged.

Got home Tuesday at 8:30PM, plopped myself in front of the computer and set the patch to install, turned and asked my wife and children how their day was. Turned back to the computer when the patch was done, got a few new add-ons, put my headset on, logged in and was ready for Zul A'man.

We had a really good time there too. We downed Nalorakk in two shots (he dropped the [Robes of Heavenly Purpose]) and then we moved on to Akil'zon, and we tried about four times to down him, got him to 24% on one of the attempts. We were happy with our performance. The other guild group didn't make it passed the waves of Amani'shi Warbringer so we were pretty proud of ourselves.

Before bed I farmed the [Pattern: Bag of Many Hides] and checked my auctions (jerks had undercut my feathers). Eventually I lowered the price to 25 gold per stack and they sold no problem, I also sold a ton of Heavy Knothide Leather (they would sell as soon as I listed them) and one of those nice leatherworking bags for 445 gold (that won't happen again, the price has already dropped to 250!) So I made about 1,000 gold in two days, through some nice planning on my part.

Of course, I got some serious and deserved Spouse Aggro in the morning for coming home and ignoring the family.

New Topic: Okay... so the hunter forums are all in an uproar because we lost the following abilities: Double Trapping and Feign Death Drinking. I never double trapped, although things do sometimes walk into my traps unintentionally so I think this change is not a real well thought out one, since our CC is not very target specific, plus it seriously nerfs the Survival tree. The FD Drink thing, I also never used. I would put a Superior Mana Oil on my weapon and use Elixir of Draenic Wisdom, Aspect of the Viper, plus some fel mana pots to make sure I had enough Mana for the long fights. I never liked how the FD drinking took you and your pet out of the fight, so no loss there, but the crying that is going on on the forums, after all our great buffs in 2.3, is personally embarrassing to me.

Finally, I will be away for the next week doing the Family Thanksgiving thing, so I will miss our next two ZA runs... Alas. I will try and post in that time, but if I don't get a chance to, I'll be back in a week.

Patch Day, working alot, Working late, oh my...

Okay, so I have 80 minutes before a big meeting for which I have been preparing for quite awhile, hence the slow down in posts.

I will be working until 8PM tonight get home at 8:30 and go to ZA, assuming everything loads in correctly, at 9PM.

I have two posts already written in my head (one about allies one about guild stuff) but no time to put them down on "paper".

Maybe tomorrow.

How magnanimous am I?

2.3 is almost upon us and I have amassed over 300 light feathers, 100 Heavy Knothide Leathers, a primal nether and 2 primal airs. As soon as 2.3 goes live I will be making myself a [Quiver of a Thousand Feathers] (I'll be able to put a roll over link to that after 2.3 is live). The question is, what will I do with my remaining 200 feathers?

I have offered to friends and guildies, that if they run me through a heroic to get the Primal Nether, I will make them a quiver. (Ammo pouches are out of luck, as I never attained revered with Honor Hold.) I even mentioned that I would trade feather and leather for Primal Shadow and Primal Fire, since I need them for my [Ebon Netherscale Girdle]. I also said I would farm Nether Dragonscales in trade for those primals. But what do I do if Light Feathers start selling for 20 gold per stack? Nether Dragonscales for 100? Am I a nice guy or do I make a quick profit?

Here's what I'm thinking -- early Tuesday morning before the patch I will put up 5 stacks of Light Feathers for sale at the crazy price of 40 gold. If they sell at that price great, if not, I'll have them available for friends.

I guess there is a price at which friendship just can't overcome, especially when those friends have gold of their own. After all its fake money in a pretend game and I'm usually the good guy. Plus if they didn't know to start stocking up on Light Feathers shouldn't I punish them for being a n00b?

Of course when you put it that way, I'll feel really guilty, being a n00b myself... but I'll just throw all my gold onto the bed and roll around in it and then I'll feel better!

Being a n00b is better than being a jerk!

So our Kara team is taking a little break -- we were going to take two weeks off, but it looks like it will be only a week as we will start up Zul'Aman when 2.3 drops on Tuesday.

In the meantime, four of us decided we would spend Tuesday running heroics. That left one spot for pugging and since we had two hunters, a priest, and a feral druid, we really needed a mage. We picked Slave Pens and started looking for a fifth. We found one and summoned him using the summoning stone did a /inspect and see that he was wear all blues and greens. We agreed that he was not quite ready for heroics and asked him to leave. He understood, we apologized, he opened a portal and off he went -- no hurt feelings -- at least not too badly. I'm sorry to say I don't remember his name, because he was cool about it.

I do however remember the name of the mage we picked to replace him and if you're on Hyjal and send me a tell I'll spill the name so you know not to group with this person.

This fire mage shows up and certainly doesn't bring the DPS like I do, on par with our MM hunter though and the sheep are nice. The first sign of trouble comes when our Priest fears a sporebat into another group.

Look, the pet was on the bat, but intimidation was on CD and I couldn't get the pet off of the squishy who was about to die so he cast fear. It's a shame that it happened we tried to stay up, but we wiped. It happens. This mage types, "That was really bad, guys."

Without further incident we got to Mennu the Betrayer and got him down with no significant problems. Our mage's typed response, "That took too long".

About 5 minutes later I pulled aggro on a pat because I backed up a little too much. We wiped again. On our way back to the instance, I noticed our mage disconnected. She never came back.

She just decided she didn't want to be a part of our group anymore and instead of saying to us, "Guys, I don't like the wiping, I'm leaving." She pulled this passive aggressive BS on us and we wound up waiting for 10 minutes to see if she would reconnect and then another 10 while we found a replacement (another Feral Druid, who off-tanked what the mage would have sheeped).

And of course, we rocked the instance and got through it without another wipe.

I just got really irate at this person and their jerky attitude. I would much rather people say about me, "He's a n00b, he backs up into pats (but he does bring the DPS)." Then saying, "He's a jerk, he says disparaging things to his party mates and drops out of instances without comment."

Am I Uberz?

So last week, while I was in Kara, there was a discussion amongst guild officers and class leaders about how to read the WoW Web stats that we were putting up on our guild's forum. I could not attend, as I was in Kara... doing this:

Now, what I want you to note in the above that pets are not combined. I am at the numero uno position at 17.4% and my Ravager Kodos is at number 7 at 7.2%. Combined it looks something like this:

DAMN -- this is a boatload of damage. Blkwidow at the five spot would probably be higher but she, like a good class leader, was in the meeting, as they dissected the WoW Stats, so could not give Kara her full attention.

However, when she returned from her Vent meeting, she told me that they asked "How does Mervyn do so much damage?"

"I really don't know" she told them, "He's doing it right now in Kara and his gear is not as good as ours... must be some beast master thing."

As you can see from below on one of our failed Gruul attempts, I am number 1 baby! As a matter of fact 1,2 & 3 are all hunters! (7 & 11 too, but someone shattered them early in the fight.)

So, I think it's pretty cool that people are wondering how a n00b like me gets to be such a DPS machine /flex!

And I tell them, I play my character and my spec well. I know what I am doing and I study up on things I need to know.

So now that I have presented my bona fides, I think I will spend some more time this week on "How I roll..." posts, so look for them.

In the meantime, since on one else will invite me, if you know of an arena team that wants an uber hunter....

And now for something completely different

Okay:
So this will be a post without a single reference to WoW. Then I will get back on my game and start talking about things. I even have the germination of something I want to write about in my head but for today... something different.
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So I was listening to the news the other day and heard that Dennis Kucinich was asked in a presidential debate if it was true that he had seen a UFO. He replied:

"It was more than 25 years ago, I don't want to go into details right now because that is not why I am running for president, but I can affirm that I did see something and it was a UFO. But so have a lot of other Americans."

And at first I guffawed, whether you agree with the man's politics or not, he is not serious contender for the Democratic nomination, and this just added to the weird stories about the man.

And then I thought, 'oh crap, had I been asked the same question, I would also have to say that I saw some things in the sky that I have no way of knowing what or who it could possibly be.'

Here is the story: In the summer of 1992 my mother invited me to join her on a trip to a spa in the Berkshire mountains. My father could not go and she wanted company... so I thought a free trip to the Berkshires, exercise and massages, I suppose I could go.

One night we went out to Tanglewood, which is an outdoor concert bowl and the summertime home of the Boston Pops. We got lawn seats to sit and listen to John Williams play some of his most famous pieces. Since we were on the lawn we could not see the symphony, so the only thing to do was look up at the brilliant cloudless, moonless sky and see the sea of stars. It was absolutely incredible, I could have watched those stars for hours!

I was lying facing North-North-West when I saw four green blobs moving across the sky heading in a Southerly direction. The blobs were about 5 times large than the largest star and glowing green they were moving in almost a "V" formation, but they would sometimes move a little bit to the side and move back. I have created an illustration:

They were a little more glow-y and larger than the ones in the example above and they didn't move straight across the sky like birds or planes. They wobbled in a semi-straight path and at one point one of them jutted out to the side quite a bit, as if it went to take a closer look at something, as illustrated below:

I knew of no flying machine or even bird that could quite move like that. I also knew I wasn't seeing things, because there were lots of people pointing up at the sky at the blobs showing them to their friends. I tapped my mother and showed it to her, she agreed it was mighty weird, but we dropped the conversation and went back to the music as they disappeared over the horizon.

That night I called my girlfriend (now Mrs. EN) and told her about the weird thing I saw, she thought it too was weird and we said our goodnights and I feel asleep.

About two months later I was at Mrs. EN's parents' house and she says to me, "Tell my Dad about what you saw at Tanglewood."
"Huh?" I asked, "What did I see?"
I had no recollection of the blobs. As she explained it all to me, I started to vaguely remember seeing them and then all of the sudden, the full memory of it came back to me, but the memory was so blanked out prior to that re-telling I feel that had I never told Mrs. EN, I never would have thought of it again.

In general when it comes to Aliens, UFOs, ghosts, etc. I consider myself a skeptic, and I still do, but I just can't tell you what those things in the sky were and why I didn't remember them the next day.
Does that make me a weirdo?