So I've been playing a lot of World of Warcraft recently... As in, A LOT! I'm going to start college again on January 6th, it seems, so I've been getting my fill the last couple of weeks. Hopefully I can work out a schedule to get all my stuff done so I can keep playing. I've been able to do it before! Never have I let WoW interfere with my school, though... That comes first. Anyway, I did something really amazing today, and I wanted to record it forever on my blog so when I browse it years down the road, I can see how awesome I was!

So I'm a healer in WoW. There's certainly a market for them... My server (Sentinels RP), as well as every other realm I've been on, seems to have a consistent shortage of healers. Everyone likes to DPS. That is to say, they like playing someone who deals out massive damage. I admit, it's fun! I prefer the Feral Combat specialization. I can solo the entire game that way (sans the instances, of course). But when I hit maximum level, I always seem to gravitate toward healing. Sit in the back, watch everyone's health meters, and give everyone a boost when they need it. What are the cons? They're big ones...

As a healer, all you do is click when the numbers say to click. When you're actually in the fight, you have special moves and the monsters have special moves and you need to be aware of what works when. As a healer, you have special moves, too, but it's more like "regular heal" versus "emergency heal" versus "oh-my-gosh-we're-going-to-die heal". I have a fancy little add on that lists the entire raid group on the left and I can mouseover and click a certain button for a certain heal. Really handy, I love it. Saves some mouse movement and down time between heals. (And adds to the sense of panic when you see all 10 people's health bars crash.)

People argue that a healer is boring because all you do is wait calmly in the background and do reactive moves. When you're fighting, you're leading the combat and taking proactive moves. All the DPS does is hit as hard as they can while not getting the monster's attention for being the most dangerous. From an outside perspective, both healing and DPSing are just mindless clicking, but being up in the fight and being directly affected by the monster you're fighting really changes the feel of the clicking! And then there's the Tank. The one guy with the massive armor and hit points who takes the beating from the monster. If the Tank dies, the group dies, period. There are usually multiple Tanks, but there's always a far stronger Primary Tank. There is a massive shortage of Tanks on my realm, too. Probably because Tanks are widely considered to be the leaders and are thought to always have the answer to every problem that arrives. It's a somewhat accurate picture, because the Tank needs to know what the monster is going to be capable of. The DPS need to know this, too, but since the monster isn't actively hurting them, it's less of an issue for them.

So, where does that leave us? Sentinels has an incredibly high number of DPS; people who want to walk in and hurt something without thinking about tactics. Nobody wants to lead. My brother (who was given the nickname BroBro by Edrick, TW and Nomad, and so will be referred to by that name from this point on) adopted the role of Tank. A freakin' huge Dire Bear Form Druid (aka big bear butt). The latest expansion pack really buffed the Druid's tanking ability. I've healed just about every tank out there... Warriors. Paladins. Death Knights. Druids. Of them all, I far prefer Druid tanks now. Death Knights are a close second. Paladins are a distant third, and Warriors trail far behind them. I don't like Warrior tanks at all.

So BroBro is a Tank and a danged fine Tank. We rarely lose a battle when we're paired up, no matter who else we have with us. Since I'm a Healer, we've got the two most important and rare roles already! DPS signing up is only a matter of time with no work involved. Just spam "looking for DPS" a few times and you're filled!

There are pros to being a Healer, too. Namely the fact that since you're such a rare role, you are pretty much guaranteed a spot in anything you want to do. (Unless your guild is a dumbface.) I've been out of Militis Noctis for a grand total of 2 days and I was invited to run one of the larger instances by one of the largest Alliance guilds on our realm! I performed admirably, if I do say so myself, and they took notice and I had a couple of them tell me I should apply to their guild... So I did! That was my ideal plan to looking for a guild, actually. My idea was to run instances guildless for a while, and then someone notices how good I am and then pursues me. I think it's best for a guild to come to you than for you to hunt down a guild. If they want you, they'll ask you. I think I was in my former guild for long enough for people to take me for granted. They had their own high ranking healers that everyone wanted to do stuff with, and they conveniently forgot that I was a healer, too, and was supposed to be doing things with them. But anyway! If you're a Healer, the single greatest pro is that you will never have a shortage for work. People will hunt you down.

But why am I a Healer? I admit, it can get boring. That, and I tend to assume that if the group fails, it's my fault (as do others). It's a little stressful, especially when you're trying something new and everyone's depending on you to know what's going to happen with a fight. But when it comes down to it, a Healer will usually have free reign over healing gear, since you're so rare, and if you're a good Healer, people will love you forever and you'll get invitations to all kinds of things! But personally, I love Feral Combat, as I said before. Nothing is quite like a Feral Druid on a roll... You can do anything by yourself. I love that feeling of independence. When you're a Healer, you will usually need someone else to do the fighting for you. Since they're being healed, you'll still be able to take everything and more, but you still need a partner. That part I don't enjoy a whole lot... I like doing quests at random times and I can't do that when I'm a Healer.

Then there's the battlegrounds. I never thought there was a place for Healers in PVP. Dumb idea? Maybe. The fights are so chaotic that it's almost impossible to make a difference. Right? I mean, sure, Arena 2v2, 3v3, and 5v5 need healers, but those are small enough to manage. Almost like an instance. But battlegrounds? I always thought that if I wanted to progress through battlegrounds, I'd need to be a kick butt soloing Feral Druid. Well... BroBro was playing battlegrounds with his new Druid Tank and he kept telling me how many people it took to kill him. (He could hold off 3, but any more than that and he would lose.) I decided to give battleground healing a chance. I paired myself with BroBro and we TORE THEM APART!

As long as I was there healing, BroBro would never fall. The Horde would throw themselves at him, making the deadly mistake of ignoring the healing Druid in the background, and they would dash themselves to pieces. I am completely serious. And whoever he killed, I would get credit for, too. That's how scorekeeping works with healers in the battleground. Whoever you helped, you'll get credit for their kill. (They will, too, so don't worry about steals.) Even after the Horde got smart and took me out, BroBro would still be there, alive and kicking, by the time I showed up again, and it was back to being an unstoppable force!

There was a Death Knight I took a liking to during the fight, too. She managed to swipe their flag and head into our base. The Horde had our flag, so we were both sitting there, waiting for someone's flag carrier to die. It was me and two Death Knights defending our flag. (Me, the flag carrier, and another one.) At one point, easily half of the opposing team (I swear it was at least 5 Horde, if not more) dropped in on the three of us, looking for an easy kill. No such luck. For 5 minutes we fought... The three of us versus a huge crowd of Horde. A few times I thought we might lose, but slowly... Ever so slowly... Their numbers dwindled as the DKs took them out, one by one. Eventually, we were left standing victorious as the last Horde fell (and our team came to help). It was that way the entire game... At one point, the flag carrying Death Knight got fed up with how slow our team was working, so she trusted me to keep her healed as she ran into the Horde base (WHILE CARRYING A FLAG) to get our own flag back so we could then run all the way back and score.

That's what I call putting trust in a healer. We didn't lose, either. We managed to get our flag back and we ran all the way back home and scored. Because our flag carrier trusted me enough to keep her healed so she wouldn't die, lose the flag, and the allow the Horde a score. I mean, she was very well armored to begin with, much like BroBro, but when you add my heals to the mix, they're invincible, period. In fact, I was standing alone in the field, healing whoever needed it, and a smart Orc Hunter showed up and tried to take me out. I threw up the standard heals and waited for my team to get to him. He couldn't hurt me at all... As soon as he hit me, my heals took over and I was back to 100% health. Sometimes I amaze myself... And I don't mean that in the haughty sense, either. I didn't realize I was that good at healing.

There's the final numbers from the fight... I'm Kittari, BroBro is Langnet, and the invincible Death Knight was Khaligto. As you can see, my total healing towers over everyone! 815,190 points healed... Far beyond the 300,000 required to get the achievement for heavy healing in a battleground. I only died 5 times, too, and none of those deaths put anyone in danger, either. Most of the times I died it was because someone hit me with some spells that damage over time right before they were taken out. When I died, the enemies were usually gone and my partner survived to kick more butt. Good times... Good times.

So from now on, whenever I think about switching from being a healer, I need to read this!

It's hit the internet again that World of Warcraft is an evil and destructive MMO, and, of course, everyone's jumping on the bandwagon by giving themselves pats on the backs for not trying it because they don't want this to happen, and that the game is designed to be a "drug" and entice people to keep playing, and blah-blah-blah. Good ol' modern mentality showing forth! "It's not MY fault for lacking self-control, it's Blizzard's fault for making the game a time-sink!" Hello, Earth to Moron... Games are usually time sinks, but it's entirely up to you how much time you assign to it at any given time.

This time, WoW has "caused" a divorce. No, it's not the husband's fault for playing too much, it's Blizzard's fault. Nobody wants to take responsibility for their actions, and everyone, including "professional" head doctors are quick to blame the addictive properties of a game over the true causes. Don't you think that if World of Warcraft wasn't there, it'd be something else? Heck, let's say it would have been Halo 3, because that's the latest and greatest time sink. It's also a murder simulator! That's bonus points.

And the coup de grace:

“I’m real, and you’re giving me up for a fantasy land. You’re destroying your life, your six-year marriage, and you’re giving it up for something that isn’t even real. [Blizzard] build it in such a way that you have to keep putting more and more time into it to maintain your status. I remember thinking when I was married that it was downright exploitative to people who couldn’t control themselves in that way. It’s set up like a drug.”

Yeah, she started off well enough, but then it degenerated into a "Blizzard did this on purpose, and they're being bad guys by destroying my marriage!" No, ma'am, it's not Blizzard who's destroying your marriage... It's your husband. He's made a choice to ignore you in favor of a game. The game didn't gain sentience and suddenly decide to snare your husband and force him to ignore you. (If it did, it'd be Skynet, and we'd all have far worse troubles to deal with than your husband leaving you.) Also, I might also point out that there are very, very few (if any) parts of WoW that requires you to maintain a status. Sure, there's the ever present quest of collecting more equipment so you can fight in better areas, but if you stop playing for a week, guess what? You're still going to have the same equipment. If someone brings up the fact that a guild will leave you behind if you stop playing for a week? Then that guild is stupid, and you need to find another. There are plenty of casual guilds out there. The only thing I can recall ever being a constant struggle to maintain a status was when you could get military ranks by killing the opposing faction. Back when it was introduced, you had to spend a colossal amount of time just KEEPING your rank, not even considering getting a higher rank. But, you know, they got rid of that, because WoW is designed to be a casual game, meaning it's specifically NOT designed to make you feel you have to keep playing.

Luckily, FileFront seems to know common sense:

... His addiction could as easily have been pot, liquor, porn or meth - if she were to have brought them into the house it would have been a different addiction instead of gaming. You have to go to the underlying source and peel back the layers. Was he unhappy in his marriage to begin with? Was he miserable at his job? Was he highly depressed? Was this form of escape a way to keep from coping with the living hell that his life had become? All of these plus family history can become contributing factors to any sort of addiction.

At least someone realizes that there are underlying faults at play here that nobody is willing to deal with. If it wasn't WoW, it would have been something else, I guarantee it, and there's a very fine chance that it would have been something more destructive. Yes, WoW can be "destructive" in the sense of allowing yourself to neglect daily duties, but if he would have taken up drinking, he would be neglecting daily duties and trashing his body and mind at the same time. It all boils down to why he's addicted, not how, when you want to fix something, and, no, Blizzard is never a proper "why". It's just the tool used to hide from something, if you let it.

Good ol' Digg (which I now use for reading articles, not reading comments, except I had to read the comments for this one) rose up and someone cracked the line "I don't think there's a way to play responsibly in WoW once you hit 60 or 70." What a complete and total lie. I have a level 70 character and I've been in a few raids, but, hey, guess what? I'm also a college student with a 4.0 grade point average. WHILE playing World of Warcraft... If that doesn't shoot your argument out of the sky (and give me a chance to plug my brilliance *coughahem*) then you're just ignorant and closing your mind to the honest facts that just because you can't control yourself and stop playing doesn't mean that WoW is evil and that the rest of us are hopelessly addicted.

So since I don't have my WoW blog running, yet, I'm going to grace you with another Warcraft-related posts on this blog. Remember the Booterang? (See this post, and this post.) The little boomerang boot that you fling at disobedient orcs to get them back to work. They'll be sleeping, or wandering around, or be busy being quite angry... You click on them and they'll say thing like "whaaaaat?" and "something need doing?" and "me not that kind of orc!" and "leave me alooone!", like in the good ol' Warcraft games of old, and then you deliver a mighty smite to the head.

Enter the World of Warcraft Arena. A world of pure skill where the best fight the best in a ranked system similar to that of Halo 2, except that there is no incentive to lose and drop rank to kill the lowbies. Quite an ingenious system. Anyway! My brother (finally) got to level 70... And that means we have lots and lots of stuff to do now! Including a 2 vs 2 arena. We've been wanting to try one out since it came out with the Burning Crusade, but we weren't high enough and we didn't have enough people. But, finally! We're both 70 now.

So... We're 70... We want an arena team... We need a name. We were tossing words around and, naturally, I said "booterang". I love that word! I say it to myself every now and then and laugh at myself like I'm mentally insane. So I suggested that. Booterang! Booterang... What... We need another word. So here is a glimpse as to how my train of thought works:

Booterang... Boomerang... Boomerang... Those things the Boomerang Bros. throw in Super Mario Bros. 3... OH MY GOSH. BOOTERANG BROTHERS!

We initially settled on "Booterang Bros.", just like the official name of the Boomerang Bros., but the arena system doesn't accept periods in the title, and "Boomerang Bros" without the period made it look like we were gangsters or something. "We da Boomerang Bros, bro!" So we went with the full, cultured "Booterang Brothers".

Behold! The 2v2 Arena Team: BOOTERANG BROTHERS! We've played a grand total of 3 matches so far, and we've won a grand total of... zero. Isn't that awesome? I think we set some records... First match? The opposing team charged out of their pen and massacred us in about 2 seconds. Second match, it was an identical set up. Hunter and Druid vs Hunter and Druid. It was a race of who ran out of mana the quickest... Sadly, that was us, but it lasted about 2 minutes. Next time, we're going to be concentrating on the healer first. Third match was very similar to the first, in such that the opposing team charged out of their pen and massacred us in 2 seconds. Fun stuff... Not really... But my guild assures me that we'll eventually win some.  (To which I replied, "yeah, I hope we win some after we sink to a rating of 100." They all laughed. I don't know why.)

The interesting thing about arenas is that... The points you receive are NOT based on how many people you kill, but they are indirectly based on how many you win and lose. See, every time you fight someone, you win or lose... Duh. If you win, your team rating goes up! If you lose, you go down. If you beat a strong team (I'm guessing if, by some chance, they're the closest match to you at the time), you go up a lot! If you lose to a weak team, you go down a lot. You have to do at least 10 games a week. (A World of Warcraft week is from Tuesday to Tuesday.) If you do less than 10 games, you aren't eligible for getting points. If you do MORE than 10 games, you aren't eligible for MORE points than if you were to just do 10 games only. However!

Your points are determined solely by your rating. So if you do 10 games, and your rating is where you want it, STOP and wait until Tuesday, when you get your points. If you do 10 games and your rating is NOT where you want it, play more until it is where you want it, and THEN stop.

A little weird to understand at first. Like, say, our current rating is 1460. If, say, we're 1460 when we've finished 10 games, then we'll get 255 arena points. If we don't like being 1460, and we want to be 2000, then we have to play enough games to get a rating of 2000, where we'll get 801 arena points. You have to play AT LEAST 10 games. So if you're 2000 after 10 games, then you'll probably want to stop, because if you play 11, then you have a high chance of losing and then getting less points. (Arena points, by the way, are what you use to buy rewards.)

Check it out!

Most popular MMO in the world just keeps getting more and more popular.

And then, of course, come all the people who think they're doing their duty to make comments about how they quit while they were ahead, and how they're better than everyone else because they did, or because of things like: "oh, I quit because once I hit level 70, I didn't want to repeat the same dungeon over and over and over again," and "oh, I quit because once I hit level 70, I got tired of all the guilds exploding because of the emo, angsty children," and "oh, I quit because I have a life now," and "oh, yeah, how much of that 10 million are gold farmers?" and then you've always got the people who say: "oh, I never tried WoW because my friend plays it all the time and I don't want to do that. Instead, I play <other MMO here> all day. It's a lot better than World of Warcrack."

Let's answer them in order, shall we? Because that's what I do here.

"The End-Game Content is Repetitive"

As always, to each their own, and if you don't like a game, those of us who do play want you to leave. We don't enjoy hearing people in the game talk about how bad the game is. But anyway, yes, the end-game content can get a little repetitive. Once you hit the leveling limit, all that's left as far as questing goes is what are called "daily quests" that you simply repeat every day to get a nice sum of money that you use to fund the perpetual extravagant costs of upgrading and repairing your equipment. There are, however, many, many, many instances that you can run. Granted, running the same one over and over can get a little discouraging, but that could just be because your guild is just bad. Different guilds are at different stages of doing instances, and if you're getting sick of the ones your guild is doing, you can move on. I wouldn't ever do that, because I have a bit of a loyalty thing going on, but I think over half the time, people moving from guild to guild will save themselves and everyone else a lot of headaches and sadness.

But there are some of you people who don't like to do instances, sure. I get that. I used to be one a long time ago. (And when I changed my mind, nobody was there to help, but that's another story that I always enjoy sticking in random places to remind certain people (who don't even read this blog) of it.) That's why there's more to WoW than running dungeons

Enter Player vs Player.  You know, it's that feature that lets you pit your skills directly against another player to see who's the best, and you get points for winning, with which you can now buy gear that is pretty darned close to the quality you'd get running the highest level dungeons. I'm not talking about the Battlegrounds, either. That could almost be worse than running dungeons all day, because if you don't want to be the ugly, smelly, evil Horde, you're going to pick the pretty, clean, righteous Alliance, and they just don't win the Battlegrounds (due to the amount of haughty, high-and-mighty players who think they know how to solo the thing, and completely ignore all attempts of coordinating activities). But there's a new event that Blizzard came out with when they released the Burning Crusade! Arenas. 2 vs 2, 3 vs 3, and 5 vs 5 arenas. Think of them as clan skirmishes in games like Tremulous or Counter-Strike... Only they're ranked like Halo 3 matches. 2 players against 2 equally ranked players have it out and see who's the best. If you lose, no biggie, you don't lose points. Just go on to the next match and try to beat them, too. Don't be discouraged if you don't know how to PvP, because nobody is good at that overnight. (And so, so, so many people don't want to get good, so they just complain about losing all the time and don't try to get better.)

There are plenty of things to do in the end-game. I don't understand the mentality behind all these dummies who complain about the monotonous and repetitive qualities of World of Warcraft and then go on to declare how awesome EVE Online or some other MMO is. Please, tell me, how is EVE Online better than WoW? On EVE, you have to wait real-world time to learn skills. I actually subscribed for one month to play EVE outside a trial and I actually enjoyed it... Up until the point where I was training to learn how to drive a super-miner, and learned that it would take literally 30 days to train. 30 DAYS. That's the entire month completely blown because I'm training. Why did I want to train this, you ask? Because with this super-miner, I could run back and forth between mining sites. Over and over. Yeah. That's it. That's like, repetition defined. Fly to a rock, mine it, fly back to base, sell it... Fly to a rock, mine it, fly back to base, sell it. How is this better than World of Warcraft?

"I Got Tired of All the Babies Playing the Game"

Simple response here: Don't play with them. There are plenty of guilds who advertise for mature players. (And by that, I don't mean... mature as in "Rated R", I mean mature as in "acting your age".) You can also leave the global channels shut off. If they're all babies, you're not going to miss anything. You're going to get noobs and brats and morons in every game you play. In fact, in EVE Online, you get brats and morons who happen to be really skilled, but still enjoy griefing the lesser players and causing problems, even in the areas that are supposed to be secure. I don't care if that's the spirit of the game, it's what happens and there's no denying it. My point is that there will be people like this in all walks of life, so you might as well start learning how to ignore them, or just deal with it. Let me help you along! The major channel for whining is the Trade channel, because it's global. (Bad move, Blizzard.) The answer is simple: Shut it off. This is how you do that:

1. /leave Trade

There is no step 2. That's it. If your guild is getting overrun by newbies who are pining for free help, then talk to your guild master or someone in charge and tell them. If nothing changes, absolutely nothing is stopping you from leaving the guild and finding another one. If your guild is as bad as you say, there shouldn't be any second thoughts about leaving, right? Or is it a good guild, but you can't stand new players asking questions like you did when you first got the game? There's a difference.

"I Quit Because I Have a Life Now"

This has to be the number one fallacy of the planet. "World of Warcraft destroys lives." Everything in moderation, dude. As for myself, I am a 4.0 college student in his second semester and I'm in a Karazhan run in my guild on the Sentinels realm. How's that for smashing the fallacy that WoW is a drug? If you can't play WoW because you don't know how to take fun in moderation, then say that. Making yourself look like a hero for breaking out of the "chains of addiction" just makes you look stupid. If you can't handle WoW and life, fine! Really, that's fine. Making it sound like you just fought off the latest illegal drug? Not so much.

"How Much of These Subscribers are Gold Farmers?"

Does it matter? Really. Ask yourself if it really matters? Does it matter that 9 million of the 10 million members are gold farmers? The money still goes to Blizzard, and everyone compares subscription statistics, not "active people who are leveling up properly" statistics. But if you're really dead set on asking this question, I'm going to ask again, does it matter? Every MMO has gold farmers. That's a fact of life. People who actually get paid to make money in the game so that they can sell it to lazy players for real-world money. I think the exchange rate is 50 USD for 1000 Gold in Warcraft at the moment. I only know this because of spammers in Stormwind, I might add. But come on. This question is utterly pointless, because every MMO has gold farmers. EVE, Everquest, Star Wars: Galaxies... They all have gold farmers. The question is, what does the developer do about the gold farmers? I don't know about you, but I think I keep reading month after month, about how Blizzard bans hundreds of thousands of gold farmers, cheaters, exploiters, etc. I don't know about you, but I think Blizzard is one of the few (if not the only) companies who actually bans people from their service. How many companies do you know that ban paying customers? Blizzard keeps adding more and more countermeasures and options for us good players to use against them. We have a new Report Spam option that will automatically tag a spammer, submit a ticket, and ignore the spammer, all in two clicks. The Warden (you know, that nasty, evil, no-good program that SPIES ON YOU, OH MY GOSH!!!) is constantly updated with more and more algorithms to detect cheating applications, and Blizzard BANS them. How many of the 10 million subscribers are gold farmers, you ask? My answer is: Less and less every day.

"I Don't Play WoW, I Play <Other MMO Here>."

The good ol' "I won't touch WoW, but I'll play another MMO that takes up just as much time, no problem, because since it's not WoW, I'm somehow above you all". Remember that post I made? Yeah... That applies to this. Go read it, if you've never seen it. I'll say now that the reason I compared WoW to Uru is because the person who ranted about WoW being evil is an extremely addicted (er, I'm sorry, AVID) Uru player. I don't think I'll ever forget what she said... But, then again, this is the same person who took over a project I was involved in and tried making me jump through a bunch of legal hoops so I couldn't come back and say they kicked me off the project or some such crap. I refused to say anything of the sort, because she should have known that I'd never do something like that, and she got all upset at me and told me how stupid I was, and then left... Only to come back a few minutes later and gloat about how she'd gotten into the Uru Beta (which was completely against the Terms of Agreement, but who listens to that anymore?) and asked where all my friends were. Yeah. That gives you some credibility to say WoW is evil, little miss snotty. I think you're the reason I stopped playing Uru, plain and simple. You're obviously too good for me, so why should I even bother? While you're all busy fighting amongst yourselves, trying to determine who the best fan is, I'm having fun raiding Karazhan with my new guild mates, not wasting my money on some "who can suck up to Cyan the most and get the most benefits" social playhouse.

Oh, by the way, I got into the Uru Beta the very day after she did... So her gloating was short-lived.

So the Indianapolis Colts lost in the Playoffs... Big surprise there.
But hey, at least the Dallas Cowboys lost, too...
Now we need the New England Patriots to lose and everything will be perfect.
Anyway... Here are some more Dragonmaw Orc Peons!

This is after you give the poor orc a mighty wallop for slacking off:
"WHY IT PUT DA BOOTERANG ON DA SKIN?? WHY??"

Here are various sayings when you chuck out some poisoned bits of meat for them to get sick on... Remember, even though they're awesome, they're still bad orcs, and you're trying to stop them from ravaging the home of the Netherwing dragons:

"Me so hungry! YUM!"

"Mmmm! FOOD!"

"Time for eating!?"

"It put the mutton in the stomach!"

And here's a random human Paladin dancing on a fountain in Stormwind City in his underwear:

There's an extensive line of quests that allow you to gain reputation with a faction of dragons called the Netherwing. Once you get the highest standing possible, they'll allow you to pick a dragon to aid you in your journey. (Definite hints of Pern here.) The dragons will even speak to you! Really sweet... But to gain reputation, you have to infiltrate a band of orcs who have overrun the dragons' home, and you have to gain reputation with THEM in an attempt to get in a position to take them out completely. One of the quests is one where you have to go around and discipline disobedient orc peons with an amazing little gizmo called a Booterang. Basically? A boot you throw at them and it comes back to you after delivering quite the beat-down. Boomerang + Boot = Booterang!

So here I go, walking along to look for some disobedient orcs. I quickly found one:

A very outspoke peon who has suddenly decided that he's too good to be picking away at Netherwing crystals all day and has settled to declaring his dominance over his superiors. And as if I wasn't laughing hard enough as seeing this little quote, he then proceeds to declare this little gem:

I couldn't have said it better, little orc. I couldn't have said it better.

That's right. That's me in my new Swift Flying Form. 280% speed increase in the air, 100% speed increase when running along the ground. I can fly anywhere faster than using flight paths, simply because I can fly "as the crow", and get from Point A to Point B without any swerving or curving. This... Only after about a week of farming for 4000 gold worth of herbs and Primals, and only after about 2 weeks of playing with my new guild.

I started hitting the end of the line as far as solo content goes, so I started looking at guild recruitment posts and threads and advertisements and I found one that looked promising: Militis Noctis. You know, the whole thing where they promise to help you get done whatever you need done, and they let you play however you want to play, AND they do dungeon instances. It's pretty much the dream guild on paper. So I decided to give them a shot. Little to no roleplaying, which is okay for now. I always thought RP'ing on a guild channel was a little wonky, seeing as how you can talk to anyone, anywhere, any time... A little... Unrealistic for roleplaying. But anyway...

The first night I join? I was asked to run an Outlands dungeon. My first since the dungeon in Hellfire Peninsula! So I group up and we smash through a dungeon in no time. The next day, someone needs to run a dungeon called Mechanar, so I group up and we smash through that dungeon, too. Unfortunately, I'm not keyed for the big one called Karazhan, but guess what? They're actually helping me get keyed, too! It's everything Ahrotahntee promised, only MN delivers on those promises. I told them I'd be willing to try them out, but I've fit in so quickly and we've helped each other so much so quickly in only a week, that I think I'll most likely stick with them.

So, anyway. I hit 5000 gold last night and bought training for Riding 300, and then more herbs sold and I hit 200 gold, with which I decided to buy a swift griffon mount. I almost didn't buy one, because I could just use my swift flying form once I finished the quest, but the quest has you running through a heroic instance (which means it's extremely difficult), and I didn't think I would run it for a while, because the guild is still trying to get through Karazhan. Buuut... That night was scheduled a heroic instance run that didn't follow through, so everyone was free to do Heroic Sethekk Halls, which is what I needed! So now I have my swift flying form and a guild that actually helps... Yay! We only wiped once on the boss, too. But we don't technically count the very first attempt ever, because that's the learning attempt. After we knew what to do, it was easy. (Nerve-wracking and intense, but still relatively easy.)

(Yes... This was a post to show off. My guild rocks!)