Priestly Bubbles

The guild brought in a new shadow priest.  I was nervous at first because it was when my computer was out of commission so I thought I was being replaced.  But the officers have said over and over that they don't want me going anywhere and that we just needed more ranged.  They're also encouraging me to make friends.  I'm trying, okay!

What's the first thing I do?  I critique him.  Yeah, it's a bad habit.  Whatever.  He's almost perfect.  If you took the sticky on the priest forums and turned it into a priest, this is what it would look like.  He's got Woaden's spec and gemming.  The only difference is that his off set piece is Gunship Captain's Mittens instead of the pants.  I guess he preferred the hit from them.  I prefer my hit bracers and neck.  So far, he looks good.

After I pick up Dying Light and do my typical "I just won an awesome piece of loot!" dance in my chair, I compare our gear.  We both have 4 set sanc, except his off set piece if Gunship Captain's Mittens and mine is heroic Sanguine Silk Robes (because I used to go holy a lot for this guild).  We both have heroic Dying Light.  We have several pieces of alike gear.  We both have regular Phylactery of the Nameless Lich, but I have regular Muradin's Spyglass where he has heroic DFO.  In my math deprived mind, I think "our dps should be about the same".

A little background info.  I'm extremely competitive.  I would be in a top guild if I could handle the social retards that tend to lead those guilds.  Some of my friends are in some FANTASTIC top guilds, but I can't seem to find one that needs a priest.  So I'm in this casual HM guild.  I love it here.  They're fair, relaxed and mature, and I've made some amazing friends.  They know I'm a crazy, but they like me for it.  Anyway, moving on with the little story.

My goal is to beat him on every fight.  Another shadow priest in the raid is really good for my dps.  I beat him on a few fights, but he beats me most of the time.  I check and compare our rotation, dot uptime, etc.  Everything seems to be the same.  Finally, I'm watching party chat, and I see something that gives me an idea.  Everyone in party is bragging about how high they can get with their spell power when everything procs at once.  I get about 5k, one of the mages 4.5k (mages tend to have lower spell power than priests, but more benefit I guess), and the new shadow priest above 6k.  6k????  WHAT?  I armory him and compare our spell power.  It's about the same unbuffed.  I compare our haste.  I'm sitting at 850 ish unbuffed.  He's at 1100.

I confide in my mage friend, and he laughs at me.
"Heroic DFO is a bigger boost than you think."

It's amazing how much a little haste and one trinket can do.  Now I want that trinket so bad I can taste it.

So I'm leveling my druid again.  I'm queuing as heals, because it's faster, and I have a healing set/spec.  She's 74 right now, and healing is a breeze.

First instance queue pops.  It's Old Kingdom.  I glance over the party members.  Who is the tank...?  I finally figure out that it's the dps death knight that's pulling everything.  I start healing like crazy.  Several trash pulls, a brez, and an innervate later I finally get a chance to sit down and drink.  The "tank" pulls the boss.  He drops like a rock.  Fed up, I drop group.

I requeue.  OK again.  I switch back to my resto spec and figure out who the tank is as she pulls the first trash mob.  Shit...I'm still in my cat dps gear and I have no mana.
After the trash pull, which is somehow managed to keep us alive:
"Could I maybe get some heals?  I got to like 100 health there."-paladin tank
"Could I maybe get some mana?  I had like 100 mana there."-me, snarky because I'm already annoyed with pugs
"Dude, you only have like 5k mana.  That's so fail."-some idiot dps
 "Well then give me half a second to switch to my resto gear."-me
You have been removed from the group.
Wtf...really?

I switch to my level 30 paladin to heal some instances there.  I get Gnomeregan with a prot paladin, a ret paladin, and two other random dps.  The tank is pulling as slow as humanly possible...or blood elfinly possible.  Finally, the ret paladin gets tired of waiting on Mr. Protpally to pull and starts pulling for him.  Fine with me as I'm starting to get bored.  After a few ret paladin pulls, Mr. Protpally runs around in a circle gathering up a bunch of mobs, stands on the ret paladin's consecrate, announces "LET THE TANK FUCKING PULL" and drops group.
Well we wipe...of course.  I apologize to the group and inform them that I'm tired of bad tanks, and we all decide to just drop and try again later.

I think it's time to play Super Mario Galaxy.  I don't have to play with other people and I'm 12 stars away from opening up a secret level or something or other.

Side note:  My computer is deadums.  The 160w power supply finally gave out and I needed a new one.  I wanted to buy a 300-400w power supply, but because I have an HP Slimline, the only power supply that fits that motherboard is an $80 160w.  NO thanks.  I'm waiting on a new motherboard that I can use my 350w power supply with.  I should be back up and running on Monday!

Okay, so it wasn't your standard QQ.  But seriously, there was a lot of it.  Some of the posts I read had the most amazing arguments.  Unfortunately, I'm sure Blizzard employees did not sit down and read all these fantastic arguments and debate back and forth on each one.  I'm sure it wasn't the impressiveness of a clear and concise argument, but the sheer numbers of those opposed.
Anyway, on to my point, those of you who actually do stop by and read my rants/thoughts/advice (thank you!), you may think that Blizzard does not listen.  You may think that no matter how much feedback you give, you, yourself, will never change anything about a Blizzard decision.  However, that's not entirely true.  It's hard for Blizzard to listen to every single well thought out suggestion, but a suggestion backed by thousands of voices?  Possibly.  Next time you want to speak out against or for something, remember the impact of the average player during this little battle.

/steps off the soapbox
Moving on!  I seriously need to keep up with this.  As of Tuesday of this week, I am 9/12 25 ICC heroic.  ICC 10 I won't even comment on, because it's all mix matched.  I think I'm something like 8/12 (Princes is retardedly hard in 10 man) and 5/12 for the drake.  Something like that...

Shadow has become my main spec.  I've gotten a bit addicted to dpsing and find it to be good times.  Holy is my off spec, which I will find myself using less and less as we pick up some solid healers (I mean, ones that SHOW UP FOR RAID).  Sorry, I dislike those who don't give it their all but expect raid invites when they do happen to log on.  No, gtfo.  Disc is a thing of the past, for now.  We have a pretty solid Disc priest raider, and as we all know, having more than one is a bad idea.

The death knight tank is sitting on the back burner for the time being.  I bring her out for alt guild runs, which are rare.  My frustration at being turned down for every ICC 10 because I'm a tank with a gearscore of 5300 has become too much for me to enjoy playing her.

My hunter took my death knight's place as my first alt.  So much fun to play!  Nymarl of Nathrezim if anyone's curious.  Feel free to insult her gear.  I'm coming back to huntering and when I was actually a hunter, I was BM, because it was still the cool thing to do.

I will try to keep up with this as I continue to raid.  I'll post more stories and screenshots of us in raid.  We have a good time while we progress!

My boyfriend and I will be moving in November!  Into a larger, nicer apartment with some friends of ours.

This crazy kitten has actually begun to gain weight!  She might no longer be underweight.  She has also gained a friend (and part time lover....eww) by the name of Kon.  A huge black short hair tomcat.  Besides spending the first day hissing and running from each other, they now eat, play and sleep together, typically if they don't think we're watching.  They're quite an amusing couple.  Little Nym, the intrepid troublemaker.  Playful and loving but sometimes with the attitude of a grounded teenager.  And the larger Kon, the typical uninterested tomcat.  However, he becomes interested when he thinks it might eat him.  He's terrified of anything larger than him, excluding Chris and I, unless we're being loud and rambunctious.  The only thing Little Nym fears is the vacuum cleaner.  But she swears to me, in quite a loud voice, that that vacuum cleaner is going to eat her.

This time I'm not coming back.  My reasons?  I will list them plain and simple.

1.  I do not wish to be called by my legal name.  Thanks Blizz, but I don't even go by my legal name IRL.  College and jobs do not make me use it, why should a video game?  My Facebook is not under my legal name, but the name I am called by.  I find it ridiculous that you will not allow me to be called by the name those call me IRL.

2.  I'm sure I could be found.  My name is quite common.  However, if you know my e-personality, including my character, real name, and other things (like my accent), I could be found.  A true stalker could find all my information.  Even though this doesn't completely terrify me, it does make me nervous.

3.  A dear friend of mine has a very uncommon last name.  Excluding her family, I've never heard her last name anywhere else.  It would be simple to find her and that makes her very uncomfortable.  I continue to fight Real ID for her sake as well as mine.

4.  This is a ROLEPLAYING game.  Yeah, I'm lame.  I like being called Nym.  All of my characters are named Nym.  It's a name I use in every single game I play.  A variation of Nymarie is what I want to be called.  Not my real name.

5.  I highly doubt the trolls will leave.  As far as I can tell, only those who are regular contributors and dear to our forums are leaving.  So what will that leave us with?  You think the trolls care if we know their real name?  No.  It's their mains they want to protect.  Not their real name.  CAD summed it up quite perfectly.

6.  Blizzard employees will be exempt from this.  Excuse me?  So it's okay if a player is found and stalked, but not an employee.  Right, makes sense.  Blizzard obviously knows this is not a good idea.  Why on earth are they implementing it?

7.  I found where someone on Facebook said that they were banned for posting links that proved that this is illegal.  Their posts were also completely deleted.  Does this make me curious?  Very much so.
This is a copy of the post:

• REALID IS ILLEGAL IN THE USA!!
  

  The Cyber Security Enhancement Bill of 2002 makes this illegal!!
  
  http://www.justice.gov/criminal/cybercrime/homeland_CSEA.htm <-- guidelines you need to see, Blizzard. Guidelines the whole ruddy world needs to see!
  ...
  http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode18/usc_sec_18_00001030----000-.html <---- More proof that this is illegal in the USA!!
  
  We need to petition the Supreme Court to shut this down. Nearly 30,000 posts have been made about this. People are pissed, there is no precedent for this kind of behaviour... let's make one. Let's make it clear to the world that a company like Blizzard does NOT have the right to give out our names. A friend of mine, Khull of The Darksun Tribe, who knows about law searched these laws up and woke me up to tell me about it. He has a common first and last name, but knows enough about cyber security, being /b/tard, to know that even he isn't safe if Blizzard makes this change.
  
  Copy and paste on the US forums!!

 

If you honestly think you don't care if your name is there for all to see, good for you.  But don't be a dick and say that everyone should be okay with it.  You can't change people's opinions and some people just aren't comfortable putting their names out there.  There are other ways to combat forum trolls!!!!  I agree perfectly with the author of CAD:

• If they've got the Battle.net account system in place, why not allow us to choose a single nickname associated with the Battle.net account. Any time you want to post on a Blizzard forum, this is the name that is going to show up. This is the name that you are known by in the Blizzard community, no matter which game, until you decide you've fucked up enough that you need to buy a new account to get a clean slate. And if you're really nasty, Blizzard removes forum permissions for that Bnet account.