I played too much WoW yesterday. >< Yuge was home from work, so I took the opportunity to spend almost all day on WoW. I did a couple of heroics on Panacea with Twelvians (UB and Crypts), then did Mags and Kara with Twelve on Panadoll, then BWL on Panadoll with more Twelve, and finally Onyxia with Yuge, Lutzi and a few other people (including Leth). Panadoll got her classic raider achievement! :D I was pretty exhausted by this time though. Took a little break to eat & watch TV, and I was just going to go to bed & read, but I got lured back in. >< I spent an hour or so before bed on Panacea grinding Kurenai rep in Nagrand, and finding out about the guild drama that had been going down earlier in Panacea's absence.

Recently there have been a lot of new people joining the guild, and a lot of them are youngens. There have been a few jokes in officer chat about the guild turning into a creche. I haven't really been paying all that much attention to guild chat lately, but I have gotten some people whispering me about the nublets. Yesterday a new recruit was gkicked because he was swearing at everyone ("fucking noobs" I think was the term he used) because nobody would come help him in STV. There is one particular new guy, called Tigerbum, who gets picked on a lot because he doesn't know much about the game and has a way of talking that makes him look kinda stupid. Yesterday he was apparently getting bullied mercilessly (one of the top offenders is another new recruit who I don't like much due to their bad attitude and general rudeness) when his brother came online and informed the guild that Tigerbum is only 11. If I'm online and see any more bullying towards Tigerbum, shit is gonna go down. I'm thinking of asking Indi to create a new 'sin bin' type rank to demote people for a set period of time if they behave like idiots. There's an officer meeting tonight, so I might bring it up there.

After the SotM Kara being cancelled yesterday, Verd tried to find a PuG. He managed to get into a fail group that wiped on Attumen, but did eventually get him down. No other bosses though. So today he really wanted to go back and finish it, cos today was the second last chance we had to do Kara before the xpac, and he really wanted some loot from Moroes. So I agreed to come with on Panacea. At first, it looked like we wouldn't get anywhere, cos we couldn't find healers (at least, healers that wouldn't scream at us to start moving and then suddenly leave without warning). We hung around for ages in front of the new boss (Tenris) looking for healers, with me and Lethrblaka getting impatient for us to give up & disband (Leth & I were both there because we felt we had to be for Verd - I felt guilty for cancelling Monday's Kara and Verd had run Leth's alt through SM earlier). Finally someone said they'd log over to their holy pally, Verd respecced resto, and Yuge decided to grace us with his presence as main tank. So we were ready to go. :D

It was a speed run because the servers were going down. I thought they were going down at 8, so I wasn't expecting to get far since we started at about 7:30. But they actually went down at 10, so we managed to get through Moroes (Verd's loot dropped for him ^_^), Maiden, Opera (got Romulo & Julianne, which I hadn't seen before), Nightbane (I got Robe of the Elder Scribes - not sure if this is really any good for me & I probably shouldn't have rolled on it ><), Curator (got my T4 gloves, woot ^_^) and Illhoof. We ran up to Aran with 5 minutes til shutdown. o_o Someone moved during flame wreath in the beginning, and although we fought pretty hard (well, not me so much, I died early) we didn't manage to get him down. Impressively though, the other spriest managed to chuck a bubble on Yuge near the end, and he was able to hearth back to Shat. :O The rest of us only had just enough time to res inside the door before the server kicked us out. xD

I've been really, really burnt out on WoW lately.. haven't really wanted to play that much. I've been getting a bit depressed about things.. I have problems with both of my toons' guilds.. and problems with the way I'm playing. Like I wish I wasn't so focused on trying to play awesomely and get awesome loots. I just end up feeling like crap when I don't play awesomely and don't get awesome loots. :P I really enjoy raiding but I often can't get past competitive feelings. I guess that's the main thing making me feel bad, cos I don't want to feel that way at all. I want to just be excited about seeing content I haven't seen before and reach my little personal goals. Not be comparing myself constantly to other players. :(

Anyways, I've been doing a fair bit of old world raiding with Twelve lately, on Panadoll. We've been to AQ40 (though we didn't down the final boss, and I wasn't online when they went back & did it ><), MC and ZG. I did really enjoy seeing all this stuff :) But I'm pretty crap at the 40-man raiding. Heals go where now? lol. ZG was the most fun I think, though I did really like AQ40 also. I've been wanting to see AQ for ages. I'm just annoyed I didn't get the achievement of completing it :(

I'd organised a SotM Kara for Monday night, but when I logged on Panacea I had all these mails from people cancelling. It ended up that only me, Yuge, Verd and Cretton were still keen to go. The two main people I'd made it on Monday for, Cy and Indi (guild leader) weren't able to go. Cy at least sent me a mail about it but there was no word from Indi at all. Slightly pissed off about that. Anyways I cancelled the Kara, since Yuge wanted to go off and do old world raids with Twelve anyway and Verd is adept at pugging such things. I wasn't into the idea of pugging Kara. Death has organised a ZA later this week, which should be interesting. :)

After talking about running a guild Kara for ages, and repeatedly asking people - in game, on the forums - if they were interested, and getting hardly any response, I finally decided to just make a Kara event on the calendar and invite people as they logged on and were interested. Immediately almost a full group was keen. This group, is made up of nothing but warriors, druids and priests... but since Kara's been nerfed, I think we can run with that.

Anyway, I changed the guild announcement to let people know that a Kara was being organised. What I did not realise was that our guild leader was interested in coming along. I've always been under the impression that Lilac wasn't particularly interested in endgame raiding - stemming back from around the time when I first joined the guild and I heard her say that she wasn't really looking forward to hitting 70. She just never really seemed that keen on anything other than soloing.. I never saw her asking for instance groups, and I had never, ever seen her express an interest in going to Kara. Now Lilac is currently level 68, and today she asked me if there were any minimum gear requirements to come along to Kara. I told her there weren't, but unfortunately all the spots for the raid had been filled bar one, which had been reserved for a geared healer. She told me ok, but then Cy (another officer) began whispering me & telling me that Lilac had been working really hard to level to 70 for Kara, and that she felt that she was being left out of guild events which wasn't fair since she is GL. I was like wut?? This was the first I'd heard of her even being interested in Kara. I apologised to Lilac in guild chat for not sending her an invite and confessed that I didn't know she wanted to come to Kara. She answered like she was pissed off and I was like O_O! I grovelled for a bit but slowly got angry. Why should I be made to feel like I've done something wrong when Lilac never gave me any indication previously that she was interested in coming to Kara?? Also Cy seemed pissed off that all the raid spots had been filled too (I didn't invite him, as he's still level 66) as he has been rushing to level up so he can come to Kara. Why should I be made to feel like crap because I invited guildies as they expressed interest? And Lilac always knew that I planned to organise a guild Kara - if she was interested in coming, she should have told me directly.

Lilac also told me that she could not set up Vent, because of her computer being in the middle of her house where her sons were around.. Personally I don't get this, because she could quite easily plug in some headphones and just listen to us on Vent, she wouldn't need to speak at all. And the detailed screenshots I have posted in the guild forums should make it extremely simple for even the most computer-illiterate person to set up Vent. So her Vent excuses aren't really valid at all. When I tried to explain to her the need for Vent in Kara (especially for first timers) she eventually said that she's not ready for Kara then, and she will wait until she can get her computer away from her boys. Hunh??? I really don't get her aversion to wearing headphones in front of them?

ugh, stupid guild drama is stupid.

I wasn't planning to do much on WoW today.. kinda wanted to have a bit of a rest from all the instancing, and just do dailies and farm rep. I logged onto Panadoll to do the Quel Danas dailies. While I was there Lutzi (on Fuzo) began organising a Kara raid for Leokadia, who had just dinged 70. I remember back in the day when Panacea was just a little level 11 running around Loch Modan and ran into Leokadia, then level 42, and thinking I'd never catch up to her. xD /nostalgia :P Anyways, I asked Lutzi if Panacea could come along to the Kara run, and he said ok. So I logged over to Panacea, and immediately got the nervous shakey adrenaline feeling I always get whenever I raid with Twelve - partly of course because they are all so much more experienced and awesome at this game than me, and partly because this was to be Panacea's first time in Kara.. my first attempt at DPSing in a real raid.

Kara was awesome fun! I think I did pretty well, though I had a little trouble in the beginning with targeting mobs, as my usual way of doing it in instances is to just click on the tank's target, next to their name, but in a raid my frames are different and don't show the mob the tank's attacking unless I target the tank first. I got used to it after a while though. Of course I was way down the damage metres, usually in about 6th spot, but I did manage to get up to 4th a couple of times. :D I shackled my assigned mob like a pro on Moroes, and did quite well on the other bosses too, except for Nightbane and Shade of Aran. On Nightbane I died early on because I didn't have my visual settings set high enough and couldn't see the charred earth, and therefore died cos I was standing in it. >< Shade of Aran remains my most hated of Kara bosses; I have died every time I've done it. I thought I had the strategy figured out - move to the outside of the room on Arcane Explosion, and stop moving completely during Flame Wreath. But I got aggro somehow near the start of the fight, and died from it pretty quickly. One day I'll do it and actually survive.. ><

I got some good gear from the Kara run. :) Bands of Nefarious Deeds from Maiden, Wicked Witch's Hat from Opera (we got Wizard of Oz again.. I've still never seen Romeo & Juliet :P) and Adornment of Stolen Souls from Prince. :D And a whole lotta badges. :)

Later on, I logged on Panacea again planning to just buy up some mats and make my Frozen Shadoweave Boots finally. But Verd was in a Magtheridon PuG, and asked in guild chat if either me or Help would be interested in joining it, as they needed a shadowpriest. I was dubious at first as Panacea is not really geared for Mags, but Help (who is less geared than Panacea, mostly in PvP gear) was starting to look like he was keen so I jumped in before he could. :P I was summoned into Mags - they'd cleared the way through up to him already. We wiped on the first attempt after getting him down to 25%. A couple of people left, and I got Yuge invited in to tank. On the second attempt, I was assigned backup clicking duty, which made me a bit nervous. But I worked my ass off, managed to stay alive through the entire fight while running back and forth to check on the clicker, getting out of fires and trying to stay in range of Mag to dps & put my all important VT on him. We managed to get him down. :D And then, amazingly, I managed to win the roll for his head with a roll of 99. xDDD So now I have a shiny new Band of Crimson Fury!

Afterwards I went back to my plan of buying up the mats for my boots (I farmed the netherweb spider silk for them though, as they are going for 11g a pop on the AH at the moment ><) and eventually made my Frozen Shadoweave Boots. ^o^

So yeh, a very successful day! 5 new epics, yays! xD Panacea is fast approaching Panadoll's gear level now. I am so glad I got to take her through Kara before the expansion.. and I never even dreamed I'd get her through Mags as well. :D

I've been running so many instances lately.. it's pretty much all I've been doing, as well as occasionally taking Panacea to Nagrand to grind Kurenai rep & look out for Halaa raids (of which there aren't many, irritatingly). Panadoll has healed a few instances for guildies, but I've mostly been doing instances on Panacea. DPSing is a bit less stressful than healing, and I think I'm quite good at it (often topping damage metres ahead of locks and mages) but it's been fun to heal on Panadoll once in a while. :)

Today I went to MgT (normal) for the first time, on Panadoll. I was there healing for a guildie, Verdiline, a druid (and the only real tank in our guild) who had been trying to get through the instance all day, but had all sorts of unfortunate troubles with groups falling apart, the instance resetting, constant wipes, etc etc. It was quite easy at first, as we had a well geared tank (Verd was DPSing) from one of our server's high-end guilds, Over Nine Thousand. Unfortunately though, this tank had to leave after the second boss. We managed to get in a pally tank who wasn't very well geared at all (having just hit 70 I think) and the healing got a lot harder, mainly because the group couldn't seem to keep aggro off me. I died several times and had to go repair, but we chugged through up to Priestess Delrissa. This is where we hit real problems. >< The pally tank decided to log over to their better geared resto druid, as they said tanks were useless on this boss. I brought in Panacea to lend more DPS, but we still wiped, and the group fell apart. Man I knew MgT was hard, but this was ridiculous hard. :(

Later on, Yuge said he would tank heroic slabs (the daily) for Panacea, and my brother (Hannika) said he would respec from moonkin to resto and come along too. But we were only grouped for a short time before Yuge ditched us for Twelve's Mount Hyjal, which he had warned me beforehand he might do, but Hannika had already respecced, and after our group disbanded he had to respec back to moonkin so he could farm, wasting 100g. :( He was pretty pissed off. I got into a group for normal slabs (I have run slabs so many damn times, lol) and afterwards my guildie friend Deatharra (arms warrior) and her holy priest husband Pelor wanted me to come dps normal Steamvault. Hannika agreed to come along as well, so we spent a while looking for a tank. I noticed Yuge wasn't at Hyjal anymore and asked if he'd come tank. Apparently there was some drama with a troll who got their raid leader banned for some Vent thing, and the Hyjal run had fallen apart. So he agreed to come tank SV. I noticed during the run that Hannika wasn't in a very good mood, and Yuge asked me if Hannika was pissed off at him. I spent the SV run in three simultaneous whispered conversations with Yuge, Hannika, and Deatharra (who has grown nervous of Yuge, because he has tanked a lot of instances for her and she knows he doesn't like running normal instances much) and found out that yes, Hannika was still pretty pissed off with Yuge, telling me he was just tired of waiting around for Yuge and he thought it was pretty scummy to leave our hslabs group for Hyjal, when Hyjal will be obsolete so soon. Meanwhile party chat was pretty much silent, except for a few terse directions and passive aggressive remarks... ugh, dramariffic. I think Death's husband Pelor is getting sick of healing instances for Death too.. he is a little better geared than Panadoll, and prefers raiding with his guild I think.

I wish Spirits of the Moon had more 70s who wanted to run instances, rather than PvP, cos otherwise we'll never get enough people geared for Kara before the expansion. :( At the moment, the most likely candidates for guild Kara are Panacea (geared just well enough for Kara I think), Iamleo (enthusiastic hunter who loves instancing and could just about do Kara), Verdiline (druid tank, Kara-capable), Helpfulness (other shadowpriest, geared just about as well as Panacea, but in more PvP gear), Avidmaul (recent addition to the guild, a Kara-geared resto druid), and Deatharra who is still only level 68, but is trying to get to 70 as fast as possible, and who plans to respec prot for the guild. She will need to get geared first of course, but we've been running her through level 70 instances in preparation, and I think she already has some good tanking stuff. Obviously we'd also have to PuG a few people, but maybe Pelor, Yuge and Hannika might come along for the badges (and Panadoll could come heal if it comes to that, but I really wanna get Panacea through)... anyways, chances of guild Kara before expansion are improving but still iffy at the moment.

Lots of good stuff happened today! :D

This evening Lutzi (on Fuzo) wanted to go back and finish off the Kara we did on Saturday night, before it reset. Yay for no maintenance tonight! :D Yuge was set to come too, but his computer crashed before invites went out, and he had to spend the next 3 hours reinstalling Windows, which sucked. But I nervously asked Lutzi if I would be welcome to come along to Kara anyway, and he invited me. :) He's my friend but it was still kinda generous on his part, as he was looking for really good (i.e. t6) healers to speed up the run.. and I am not one of those. :P At first, waiting around outside Kara, I wasn't sure we'd actually go ahead with it, because we were having a lot of trouble convincing the uber healers of Twelve to come along. But eventually awesometastic druid Bearilic and awesometastic priest Empithy agreed to join us. There was no way I could possibly keep up with their heals.. i.e....



I have not done any research on any of the Kara bosses after Nightbane, so my strategy was just to stick to the other healers like glue and heal & dispel as best I could. Nightbane (which, you may recall, we wiped on numerous times in the last run) went down extremely easily - the difference in the level of the group was plain to see. I relaxed a bit after that. :P The following bosses were not so difficult for me, apart from Shade of Aran, a fight which was just confusing. I need to read up on it to figure out what was going on. At one point I moved, a second after someone told us not to move on Vent, and was tossed up in the air. There were lots of Vent comments after that of a "who moved?" "who's the noob?" variety. >< So yes.. definitely gonna read up on Aran. I did do better than the first time I was at that boss - where I died instantaneously and just watched the rest of the fight. At least I didn't die this time. :P

I also want to read up on Chess, cos I really have no idea what is going on there. :P

I was hoping for a t4 helm drop from Prince, but didn't get it. :( I did however get Pantaloons of Repentance from Netherspite. :D And after the raid was over, I discovered that I now had 50 badges, so I spent them on Cowl of Naaru Blessings. :D No more Red Pointy Hat of fail, finally! That's my last green item gone. :D I gemmed up the new gear and now my heals are at an awesome 1335 (almost leet, heh). xD Yayyy~!

Here's my new hat!



and a few ( screenshots from Kara )

In Panacea news, she dinged level 40 today! :D I respecced her also, and put all her points into shadow (I am too impatient to wait another 10 levels for shadowform :P). I'm thinking I'll put points for the next few levels back into disc.



Panacea joined a group for SM arms today. I told the group when I joined that I was happy to heal if needed, but I'd prefer to dps if at all possible. The group leader told me flat out "you heal". >< It was easy enough, even though a couple people in the group were a bit low level for it (early 30's) and I got the annoying "wand please" from the group leader (errrghhhh... no) but I really would like to have a chance at dpsing an instance sometime. :-/ I'll be running SM more in the next few days so hopefully I'll get a group who will let me.

Panadoll did some more Kara tonight. :D Lutzi's alt Fuzo needed a run through. So this was the first time I've done Kara without Lutzi's heals.. I was kinda nervous, but I'm a bit more confident in my skills now.

We did pretty well at first. We had another priest (Seraphe) as the main healer (I think he has around 1350 heals) and a druid healer (Snippd) as well. I found I could hold my own pretty well though and often topped the healing charts ~



I got Gloves of Saintly Blessings off the first boss (Attumen) which I was very pleased with. :3 On Moroes, I was all ready to shackle away but when I made a slight error in timing, my shackle broke and I got killed by the target pretty quickly. We wiped. :-/ On Vent people were asking if I was ok with shackling and I was like >___< yess.. I just made a mistake that time. :P The second time I kept my target shackled up until after Moroes went down - it didn't break once. :)

I was especially pleased with myself this time around, for not dying during Maiden. :D I had read up on the fight, so knew what to expect and what I was supposed to be doing. I did pretty well dispelling and keeping everyone in range.. it was a big success. ^_^

We got Red Riding Hood for Opera. This is the one I've most been wanting to see, so I was like yay!! x3 It was much easier than Wizard of Oz. I got turned into Red Riding Hood once and I think I was the only one of us who actually survived the experience, lol. Seraphe died twice during the fight, and Snippd died once as well, but I managed to heal through. :D

Nightbane was where we hit problems. Our dps wasn't that great, and we wiped numerous times. I'm quite sure it wasn't a problem with the heals at all. I had also read up on this fight so I knew what I was supposed to be doing - much different from my first experience (where I just ran around madly trying to stay close to Lutzi :P). Seraphe and I did ok keeping fear wards on Yuge.. but because the dps was lacking - unable to get rid of all the adds, etc - we both died and were b-rezzed a few times. In the end we gave up - and someone (who sounded kinda pissed off) said on Vent that if people didn't know the fight they shouldn't be attempting it, and other stuff.. which made me feel a bit insecure but really, I'm pretty sure I was personally doing ok.

Overall I am quite pleased with how this Kara went. :D I got loot, badges, rep & raid healing experience. Yays :3

( a few screenshots )

edit// oh yeh! I also got Pattern: Soulcloth Vest in Kara, as a random drop. :D Yay for my first epic tailoring pattern!

I managed to get into another Kara this afternoon. There is one other girl in my guild (that I know of, and besides Lutzi's wife who has a low level priest called Leokadia) whose main is a priest called Konstantine. She's very well respected in the guild and as far as I know is the best priest besides Lutzi. She has a druid who just dinged 70 (Bahedrin), so she organised a Kara run. As soon as I saw Lutzi was in, I was keen to go (although I think I have gotten much better with my heals, I know he can easily hold the entire raid) so I convinced Yuge to go (his tankage is always wanted :P). He was handed raid leader, and I kinda snuck into the raid.

I'm painfully aware that my gear is still pitiful and not really good enough for Kara at all. So it didn't help when we were standing around at the beginning and someone made a snide remark about my gear. Looting was different at first than the first time I'd been to Kara (when Lutzi allocated everything) so I think I made a minor faux pas with greeding some purple gloves that I thought would be better than my blue ones, but weren't apparently. Later on Lutzi allocated loot to my relief (though nothing dropped that I wanted anyway).. I am such a noob with trying to figure out if things are better than what I already have. I normally try on different items and compare how they affect my stats. :P

At Moroes, I thought I did reasonably well with keeping my allocated target shackled, but we wiped on our first attempt (I think it was due to failure to keep aggro off Lutzi). There were still remarks made about undergeared noobs though and I felt crappy. But I thought I did well for what was literally my second ever attempt at shackling. :(

On Maiden I died early on, was ressed by a pally, died soon afterwards, was ressed by the druid Bahedrin, died immediately. Yeah. Yay for Spirit of Redemption form. :P I don't really understand that fight. I should probably read up on it.

A bit further on I think somebody pulled too quickly and Lutzi died, but I healed furiously and we mostly stayed alive. Probably others were helping to heal also, but I thought I did alright under pressure.

Shortly after this point, both Yuge and I had to go afk. And then we had to leave the raid.. Lutzi called it because everyone was doing Mount Hyjal soon anyway. By the time I got back to my computer I was logged out. I felt kinda bad for just kinda abandoning without saying anything to anyone. :-/

Anyways.. so this Kara run wasn't quite so successful. I got rep and a few badges out of it though I guess. :) I'm just a little depressed because I feel so useless compared to the rest of my guild. It's different when I'm running an instance with Yuge, I actually feel like I am doing something important for the group. We did the Mechanar today (my first time there) and I really enjoyed it. I got my Arcatraz key fragment out of it too. :) Botanica next..

So I have been neglecting this journal, and posting WoW things on my regular journal.. but my friends are probably getting a bit tired of it. :P

Panadoll has been level 70 for about a week or so. :D My guild (which is far more advanced than me) ran me through Kara on Friday night... I was terrified as I have very little instancing experience (my partner ran me through most instances as I was levelling) and no raiding experience. But since everyone else in the raid was way overgeared it was really easy and lots of fun. :D We got Wizard of Oz for Opera and I got Trial Fire Trousers :D Other Kara loots I got ~ Shining Chain of the Afterworld, Pauldrons of the Solace Giver, Boots of Foretelling (plus another pair of purple boots for my healing set - armory is showing my dps set at the moment), and Signet of Unshakeable Faith. I can't wait to go again. ^_^ I was terrible with overhealing last time around - we had an extremely overgeared healer with us (my irl friend who plays a priest called Lutzi) who could easily heal the entire raid alone.. almost every time I went to cast a heal he would beat me to it and I would overheal.. ^^;

I have Healbot installed now though. I love it so much. It makes healing a billion times easier. So perhaps I could possibly even be useful in Kara now. :P Last night I ran Shadow Labs with my partner (who plays a gnome warrior called Yuge, he's been 70 for a while now & is much better geared than me) and really used Healbot for the first time. I was nervous as I always am with an instance group (because I have so little experience and I don't want my noobishness to wipe the group) but Healbot made it so insanely easy to heal people and keep buffs up. :D There are lots of other instances I wanna do at the moment - Black Morass, Mechanar, Botanica, and Arcatraz mainly - and I'm actually confident I can heal them now... in normal mode anyways :P

Anyways this post is getting kinda long. :P So I shall leave you with a screenshot I took yesterday of someone I saw flying through Shat on the phoenix mount :O

( phoenix mount! wanty! )