2.4 Came out. The world did not fall apart but the majority of my server is on Sunwell isle. We’ve opened phase 2 and I have my phoenix pet. (Yeah I know it’s girly and doesn’t help my stats, guess what I like it anyway.)

My guild entered SWP 25, but it appears to be be tuned for a slightly higher gear level than we are at the moment. We’re back in our farm content and we’ll save our learning nights for after we’ve picked up the weeks farmed gear.

I’m excited by the patch. It was nice to be able to say, if only for a day “We beat WoW” but I’m excited to have new content to work on.

Two unrelated topics; one post! It’s like getting two malformed rambles for the price of one!

We beat Illidan last night. It felt not so epic. Our guild took longer to learn Leo than Illidan. He’s the final boss. He singlehandedly brought the well of eternity back. He’s ILLIDAN and he’s a pussy.

Beating Illidan:
Step 1) Listen to Lorelol (Akama is a pussy)
Step 2) Find tank able to shield block on command (<3 Mikedabutcha)
Step 3) Kill Parasites
Step 4) Find 2 tanks able to dodge lasers (No Mr. Bond, I expect you to stand very still while these lasers come slowly towards you)
Step 5) Spread out (Don’t stand next to Illidan)
Step 6) Kill Demons
Step 7) Listen to Lorelol (I hate Maiv)
Step Collect loot

On the other hand, the whole thing made me kinda sentimental. My Co-gm and I have been through a lot together. I was there for his first Rag kill and he helped me through my first AV. We built this guild that went from Kara to Illidan in a little less than 9 months.

When we killed him we had 10 of our original raiders from Kara still raiding with us. In our 9 month together we’ve seen people get married, had a baby born, had a new job, get fired from a job, be hospitalized, raid from the hospital, graduate college, fall in love, break up, get hit by a car (and raided that night), move out of their mom’s house, move into their mom’s house, move across the country, lose a grandparent, lose a best friend and lose a pet. We’ve seen people come and go, but through it all, this guild has remained something that I’m very proud to be a part of. So we beat wow, just in time for 2.4 to come out. I’m looking forward to conquering those new challenges together.

On the other topic, yesterday I had a stranger whisper me. She told me I was an inspiration to her as a female GM. That I was a role model for female gamers. For some reason I was very put off by this.

I’ve been playing online video games for almost a decade (I’m about to turn 26 and I started when I was 16) and in that time I’ve never really had a role model in a video game. Certainly I’ve met some people along the way that have taught me some game mechanics and some things about leadership. I’ve always been observant about social mechanics of the games I played. When I first played I quickly discovered female gamers were a rarity and, if I didn’t want to draw attention to myself, I should leave my gender a mystery to all but those that knew me very well. As time has gone by and female gamers have become a much larger percentage of gamers, and I no longer mask my gender.

I believe I approach GMing differently because of my gender, and that’s part of why I write here. But, I’m not trying to be a role model for female gamers and certainly not a part of some sort of feminist movement online. If you want a feminist role model take up with Marie Curie, Susan B. Anthony, or Amber Reeves.

Female gamers, you want to look up to me as some sort of role model, this is my advice. Stop looking at other people and start looking at yourself. Go, play your game. Play it well or suck at it. Carry yourself with dignity. Demand to be evaluated for who you are and how you play, not your possession of tits. Ignore people that can’t or won’t get over your gender. Oh, and if you whore yourself out for pixels, you’re still a whore. I hope the pixelated loot can comfort your damaged dignity. As for, I’m going to keep doing what I do. If you wanna respect that, go right ahead, but I’d rather you go do something you can respect yourself for.

Go, Read this!

So you’ve had a bad day. Your dog threw up on the carpet, your fish died and someone backed into your car in the parking lot. Some days just suck, but how do you keep real life suck from affecting your WoW time?

1) Examine the cause of suck: Some things that suck just need time to get better, but some things do require that you actively work to fix it. Never let obligations in WoW prevent you from taking action that’s needed to better your real life.

2) Examine the level of suck: Some things suck more than others. If your stubbed your toe, well in the words of one of my favorite officers, “Life’s hard, get a helmet.” If a close family member died you should expect to be more profoundly affected.

3) Examine your mood: Are you feeling bitter, sad, vindictive, helpless, outraged? Depending on the root of your emotions going and spending time in a leadership role could help you feel better or may make things worse.

4) Examine your triggers: When you’re emotionally charged there are some things that can set off those emotions. Are you going to place yourself in situation where those triggers are likely to occur? What can you do to avoid those things or minimize their impact on you?

5) Warn your raiders: You raid with these people more nights than most and some of them for a long time. You’re not perfect, they don’t expect you to be perfect. In an extended period time the odds of you having a bad day go up to 100%. Don’t be afraid to let them know that you aren’t yourself today, but you’ll be back on top of things in no time.

6) Ask for help: If this kind of suck is going to affect your ability to do the things your guild needs from you, don’t be afraid to rely on your officers or veteran members. You trust their judgment that’s why you promoted them in the first place, this is the kind of day where they get to earn their keep.

Lastly, focus on yourself and what you can do to get back on your feet. It’s tempting to feel drawn to what your guilds immediate needs are, but the sooner you can get over what’s got you bent out of shape, the sooner you can go back to being the guild leader your guild has come to expect you to be.

This excerpt is copied from a post I made in my guild’s Combat Log forums:
“We post combat logs because we belong to the school of thought that the more information you have, the better of a player you can become. The sole purpose of posting these logs is so that you can spend time evaluating what you did in a raid and think about how you can improve. We don’t care if you did 50% of the raid damage by yourself, there is always something you can do to improve your play.”

Meters can be a powerful tool for raid analysis, but tools have no value if you don’t know how to use them.

You cannot simply pull up the meters and see who is number one on the healing meter for the night and call it a day. Measuring a person’s overall output isn’t always valuable information. I’ve known many healers that can spam their way to the top of a healing meter and yet remain completely unable to keep a tank alive when push comes to shove. Meters mean nothing if they are not considered within the context of raid success. With that in mind, I’d like to highlight a few things that I always check when I look over our WWS reports to evaluate our healers.

1) If this is a buff class how often did they cast their buff?
2) On a fight where dispells are important (Archimonde curses, RoS phase 1), how many dispells did they catch?
3) How often did they res?
4) What consumables did they use?
5) “Who heals whom” report - What were they doing when their assignment is okay? (also, if nothing is around to heal, did they dps?)
6) Tank Death reports - What spells were cast on the tank as he/she died? If you didn’t cast a spell why? If you did, why’d you pick the spell you cast?
7) Healer Death reports - Check to see who’s dead at this point, if it’s not a wipe check to see what killed them. Envenom + Flamestrike + Blizzard all at once might be unavoidable (actually happened me to me), 5 ticks of standing in doomfire is a really dumb way to die.
Specific Roles - in my raids healers have assignments, if you’re assigned to heal tank x and he takes 300,000 damage and another healer is assigned to heal tank y who takes 400,000 damage and tank x and tank y are across the room from each other, then it makes sense than you’re going to do less healing than the other healer.
9) Damage in - I check this report so I have a good idea of the varying levels of hps needed to heal certain targets. This helps me evaluate how many healers I really need for a given fight.

While WWS is useful for after raid evaluation it has limitations. WWS provides a compilation of total events. It weighs all events equally regardless of when they occurred. WWS does not discriminate between damage taken while a pull is active and running into a blizzard to kill yourself after a wipe is called.

What WWS doesn’t show and how to get this information
1) Who got that clutch heal? - This is the hardest thing to catch, but ask the tank often times they notice who healed them first.
2) Mana management - While you can see innervates, mana pots and trinkets, you can’t see the actual mana levels as the fight progressed. Litmus shows you the mana levels of whatever classes you choose to see and you can set it up to give you alerts when players reach a certain level. (I love litmus)
3) Priorities: How the player picks who to heal/dispell - Xperl Raid monitor, this can set up by class. Mine is small and unobtrusive and allows me to see who everyone has targeted and what spell they are casting.