Casual Friday: Wrong!

K, everyone who hates being wrong, raise your hand?

I see two of ya that didn't raise your hands... oh, okay, you play Paladins. Carry on.

I 'spect the rest of us actually are wrong occasionally and pretty much hate it.

I'm wrong fairly frequently, but I'm also pretty big on learning. It is, after all, one more method to drag my sorry self out of the wallowing cesspool of ignorance and into the glorious light of not-quite-as ignorant.

Settle down you two, I wasn't talking about that Light.

I got it wrong twice this week.

First, I had convinced m'self through f@!kidy maths that Hit was what I needed to continue my tankish journey of self improvement. WRONG!

Thanks to Darraxus the Warrior for pointing that one out. I did the maths again, this time while mostly awake, and read some stuff from some actual, well, you know... tanks. Sure enough, Expertise is better than Hit. In most cases, way better for a Warrior tank.

So, then I tried to rationalize it that I was whiffing too much and needed the Hit to connect. Well, yah, but after watching my actual combat performance, I'm getting dodged or parried more than I'm whiffing. And guess what solves that problem? Yup. And then after looking at gear for ages, I got it into my little noggin' that there wasn't any decent way for me to GET Expertise at my gear level, so I might as well gear for Hit. Wrong. I biased m'self when I settled on Hit being what I needed, so I automagically focused on that gear and ignored too much else.

All is well, though. Mine eyes hath seen the Glory. I shalt walk the straight and narrow of Expertise and I shalt not question those that doest know better.

K, not really, but pretend with me. I'm having an epiphe... epiffian... epiph... enlightened moment. :)

I also decided it was time to get to healing again, so I got Neveron when some guildies wanted to run their under-80 toons through UK. We had a Pally tank (Tilano), a DK (Violetfury), and a Fury Warrior (Natharan). We also pugged in another Pally.

So, I'm thinking that's just perfect. A little melee heavy, but that won't be much of a problem. I can heal this easy.

Cept our Pally decided to defer to the higher level Pally and let him tank. NP. Prot Pallys punch out more than enough DPS for this instance, and a higher level Pally will be easy peasy to heal. I've healed Prots before. You can sleep through most of the instance.

Ooops. He's not Prot. He's not Ret. He's Holy.

Ah well, plate is plate, right?

WRONG!

I've healed a Fury Warrior as tank and it's exciting. It's pretty much non-stop action from the heals end of things. A Holy Paly tanking is... even more exciting? :) Well, if having a coronary every time he gets crit is exciting, I s'pose.

Anyone who thinks Wrath is too easy just isn't trying hard enough. Try leveling a Holy Priest (with no gear) through Outland and Northrend. Try healing a Fury Warrior, and then go for hard mode with a Holy Pally taking Dark Smash. And both of 'em pulling aggro like a ping-pong ball. I was practically spamming the Holy Frisbee. Sounded like a freakin' pinball machine in there. BING! BING! BING! Easy, my ass.

No, not easy peasy. I was definitely wrong about that.

I learned that Prayer of Mending is your friend. I learned you can spam flash heal very fast if stand up at the keyboard while you yell at the GCD. I learned that the healer, when actually doing their job, doesn't really get to see much of anything except their heal bars. I learned that Pally's don't understand the concept of side run and keeping the bad guy's back to the healer (Gah!) and they don't ever take advice from Holy Priests. Okay, maybe that wasn't actually my bad. :D

Doesn't hurt to be wrong sometimes. Makes us better players. But only if we pull out our heads and fix it. Sometimes a skewed and skewered perspective is just what's needed. Here's to being wrong.

Doesn't mean I have to like it. Or that I wanna be a Pally sometimes. :)

-Fri

Feelin' Lucky?

Friday is my first toon, as far as I'm concerned. Not technically, mind you. I mentioned before that my very first toon was an Undead Warlock with spiky hair. I thought it was very dark and goth and Punkish. But really, the Forsaken are mostly just grusome and twisted and too Metal for me.

Fri, though technically my second toon, was the one I really got into. So, put simply, that's why she's my main.

Unfortunately, she's also exceedinly unlucky.

RNG? Fuggitaboutit. Loot? None for Fri, thank you. Pick up 20 ears from mob-o-the-week with 44 ears each and with a drop rate of 90%? She'll have to kill 4000 to complete the quest. When I first started playing WoW, I ran VC over and over trying to get a particular sword to drop. Wanted two of them to dual wield. Nadda. Even after it was irrelevant, I kept running her through solo. Cleefy never dropped it for me, not once, that rotten, seaweed sucking, son of murloc bastard. Oh, I've seen it drop. Lots of times. Either didn't win the roll, or was running someone through that needed it.

This use to piss me off. Since maturing as a player, though, I don't even worry about it. If something isn't working I just go back later. Okay, technically I go kill the crap out of something until it's good and dead, let it respawn, and kill it good and dead again, just to take out my frustration. Lately, it's those elite giants that walk along the walls in Icecrown. But it's really the same sorta thing... Maturity = senseless slaughter, right?

What I've gotten better at is learning to do two or three things at once.

So if I can't find Shinys because some asshat Warlock, who runs in and grabs 'em while I'm killing all the giant, annoying snakes lurking about, took 'em all and I'm running around in the hot, steamy jungle in 200 lbs of armor with an idiot savant Shiny finder tagging along behind me... I just herb. Sure it takes me twice as long to complete the quest as most, but I come out of the dialy with 100g of herbs in my bags.

Ya gotta make luck work for ya, even if it's bad luck. :)

So you can imagine my surprise when in one day in HoL, Eternally Folded Blade dropped. Then in the next run (last night), Seal of the Pantheon dropped!

Wicked. :D

And now I are DEF capped enough to start buffing Hit and AP!!! Hooray!

Maybe Fri's luck is changing.

Maybe Alchemist Finklestein will finally just die.

Ah... dreams.

-Fri

* And yes, in that first screenshot those are our bones when our healer got silenced and we wiped on trash. Like that's never happened to you before... :P