I found this site from browsing the GT website for projects, faculty, labs, whatever is involved in gaming, especially social aspects. I'm a Ph.D student in Sociology at NTU in Singapore, but came over here from...Georgia. I study social psychology, symbolic interaction, games and new media. The rationales for this site are fantastic. Reflexivity is a skill and writing about our experiences certainly helps it develop. As gaming becomes more pervasive in our daily lives, this reflexivity about games, a medium which is traditionally thought of as one through which we escape from everything we normally reflect upon, will become more important. I've toyed with the idea of creating a gaming blog to chronicle my history and experiences, but I always wind up unmotivated. This, though, this is different. I can read others' experiences with games and they can read mine, making it a community of sorts. The social aspect of games is hugely important, so it follows that writing about games in a social environment may be more motivating than keeping an isolated blog which doesn't do anything for anyone.
I'm a long-time gamer since the days of Atari, though I wouldn't classify myself a gamer until college, and then in retrospect, I probably was one and would have agreed with my future self that I was one by the time I was about 16, coming home from school and playing Starcraft and Diablo 2. This GameLog is all about World of Warcraft, which I've been playing the better part of 4 years. I played a month of Everquest and about the same of Guild Wars before WoW, so WoW is my first and only long-lasting MMO. Over time, I've played for various reasons and the game has held various meanings for me. I hope this GameLog, and all the others I'll write, will help me figure out what games mean to me. Incidentally, I do research on WoW and player experiences, so my reflections are somewhat autobiographical in nature, like those I discuss with other players. Anyway, no more background. Onto the gaming.
This first entry is excerpts from an MS Word WoW journal I kept sporadically over the last 5 months. I plan on keeping this up as a positive exercise.
11-02-10 – 25 ICC. I went into the office to play. Patrick and I got in 25 ICC. It went really smooth. I was ret. Unfortunately I’m writing this a day and a half later, so have forgotten what exactly I was thinking. We had breezed through to the second wing the previous day. We spent 3 hours or so wiping on Rotface. I enjoy the progression fights. We were consistently getting him down around 50-60%, which is way better than the first bunch of times where he’d almost instantly wipe us.
There are a couple mechanics to the fight.
1) He turns toward a random raid member and sprays slime in a cone. We avoid this by everyone standing on either side of him at his feet and the tanks in front. So when he turns toward one side, everyone on that side runs under his feet to the other side and avoids damage. The first bunch of attempts, people weren’t moving fast enough and were being sprayed. It’s so easy to avoid. When you see him turn toward you, go to his other side. Simple. I was checking to see who was being hit by looking at Recount, which shows all the damage everyone takes. Anyone not a tank who took Rotface damage was standing too long in the slime spray. It looked like healers and ranged were generally being hit more with it, healers probably because they had to finish a heal before moving or something like that. I don’t think I ever got touched by it because it’s so easy to avoid.
2) When the big slime absorbs 5 little ones, it explodes. Everyone in our guild is supposed to have DBM. DBM warns you when the ooze starts to explode. This is when everyone should move a few steps from where they’re at because oozelings will rain down where you WERE standing when it started exploding. Again, very easy to avoid, but our raid had major issues avoiding this damage. People were dropping like flies every time. This one is interesting to highlight the interplay between a mod, Vent, and a player’s mediation of the two. DBM says the same thing for everyone, but not everyone understands what it means, so some people die and others live. In Vent, we had Schiza, our ooze kiter, calling out when it was exploding, but he was calling out like when it got 5 or something and it wasn’t synching with DBM. People were moving when Schiza said to move, and then stopping. So they basically moved before he cast, stopped when he started casting, and got rained on and died when he finished casting. There was a big miscommunication between what Schiza was calling out and what DBM was calling out.
3) The third mechanic is the slimes themselves. Rotface puts a disease on a random player. The disease ticks down and when it finishes or is dispelled, that player spawns an ooze. The little ooze follows that player around until it’s brought close enough to another little ooze, in which case they merge into a big ooze, or until it’s brought close to a big ooze, in which case it merges with the big ooze. We had Schiza kiting the big ooze because he was a tank and could cleanse. So, when someone got the disease, they would run to Schiza and call out when they were next to him. Schiza would cleanse and the player would stick near until the ooze merged with Schiza’s. This requires every player to be aware or be able to quickly be aware of where Schiza is around the room at any given time. It requires that player to know s/he has the disease, to call out to Schiza when s/he is ready to have it cleansed, and to stay with the little ooze until it merges, lest they bring the ooze back towards Rotface. Schiza has to kite, avoid being hit by the big ooze, cleanse, watch for players running to him, listen to players calling out to him, call out explosions. Complex stuff.
We finally seemed to get most people out of the slime and were working on the slime explosion. Lots of people were also having problems getting their slime to Schiza’s without dying. The healers are supposed to watch the diseased person so they don’t die from ticks. One time, I got an ooze, pulled off a great merger with Schiza, but then died from lack of heals right afterward. I assume no healers were paying enough attention to me, which is a problem because you can’t have everyone who gets diseased dying on you!
10ICC – After we were done wiping on 25ICC, some people wanted to do 10. I signed up thinking we’d spend an hour and a half or two hours getting past Saurfang, no problem. I think we started at like 2 or so. I was playing up in HSS. We had the room reserved until around 3. I doubted anyone would book it, but I always feel nervous playing up there, like I should be working instead. I mean, I’m playing technically to record Vent and Fraps and stuff, but I’m playing too, having a general blast, while people are in offices next to me doing “real” work writing and reading. I just don’t feel quite right playing video games in HSS. So it was really bad when I was still playing and I thought the room might be booked and I was going to have to bail on the group. We breezed through, one-shotted everything and 2-shotted Saurfang. I got some holy pants.
Here comes the fun part. We then spent the next 2 hours wiping on Festergut. So let me frame: I was sitting in HSS where I don’t much want to be playing games until 5:30pm wiping over and over after already wiping for hours on Rotface, Dai Rui calling and calling about eating dinner, just really really wanting to leave. I’d been sitting there for hours in an awkward room I didn’t want to be in anymore.
12-02-10 – 10ICC cont. We continued our 10ICC today and didn’t get any farther. We spent 3 hours wiping on Festergut again. Two people still weren’t understanding the spores. Zertan was undergeared and doing low DPS. One of our tanks was undergeared and really difficult to heal. I don’t mind wiping over and over because everyone gets tons of practice on the fight. It’s just really irritating when we have low DPS or people who don’t raid ever and don’t know fights. Zertan had low DPS and it was obvious he’d never watched a video. He also didn’t know what DI was, didn’t figure out that Stinky put mortal strike stacks on the tanks, didn’t know we needed two tanks, etc. Like, he was clueless and after 2 raid days, like 5 hours of wiping, was still screwing up on spores. It’s really important at this level that people are somewhat familiar with fights and can learn them! If not, you screw the whole raid and we spend hours wiping.
15-02-10 – So it’s obvious I haven’t been writing in here every day I play, but I figure I play enough so that occasional writing is fine, ha. Yesterday I stepped foot in my first ToGC10. Someone whispered me to DPS, I made my reservations clear about never having stepped inside, and they said it was easy, so I signed up. We go in and wipe about 6 times before Helgy gets frustrated that “people aren’t paying attention” and calls the raid. We never even got past the first guy of the Beasts. Here’s another example showing that people have to know what they’re doing to succeed, especially in this heroic raid. This minotaur calls out snobolds that jump on people’s heads and interrupt spellcasting, which is brutal if healers get it. Whoever has a snobold runs to the melee and we kill it. The snobolds were dying very slowly. Why? Because at most, 3/5 of the dps were attacking them. Helgy was getting really irritated and calling out mine and other melee dps’s names in Vent to kill the snobolds. I was on it. I looked at Recount to see what percentage of damage each dps was doing. Me, Elesh, and whatever shaman had like 55/45 or 60/40 boss/snobolds. This Zertan guy who had been screwing up all week on Festergut had like 85/15, and some rogue had, I remember specifically, 93/7. Well there’s your answer for failure right there. ToC has been out since last August, 6 months. People really should know by now to dps the snobolds. If you are in ToGC, you really should have done ToC and should know what’s going on before attempting ToGC. It really irritates me when people have absolutely no clue what’s going on.
This problem seems to be exacerbated by the fact that you can ding 80 and be raiding ToGC a week or two later. You can be playing this game for like a month and be in end-game raid situations. I played for years before I was in an end-game raid. Years is a long time, but a month is way too short to be able to acquire all the knowledge of how things work to really contribute. This Zertan guy didn’t know what DI was, for instance. If you don’t know what major abilities of another class are, you haven’t learned enough.
I also felt compelled to play all afternoon yesterday with Allison. We went from 77 to almost 79! I’m so excited to have a fresh 80, and especially with her, because I think we’re going to have a lot of fun together playing around at 80. I’m very interested to see just how easy it is to go from a fresh 80 in greens and blues to being like T9 geared, which you can buy in Dalaran and can get from ICC heroics very easily. I mean, you can farm heroics and have full T9 in a day, and then get minor pieces from ICC heroics and be 232 item level geared seriously mostly in a day. Crazy. So, I’m logging on Neph now to try and get a VoA 25.
Heals lf flame leviathan – I take this as evidence of people not knowing the fight. When people are pugging, the leader usually invites on the basis that the people know the fights. Spamming your class role when looking for a FL group is hilarious because everyone is in tanks and there are no class roles! So if you spam your class role like you normally do, it’s obvious you don’t know the fight.
Low dps in raids and booting/not booting
Thrill of hitting 80
Role of fantasy in like valrithia and just seeing big heals
25-02-10 – All loot decisions cause drama? We usually loot council our raids. We’re doing 2 10s today and one group doesn’t have an officer. They decided they want to just /roll or figure it out, not loot council. Helgy says that this will cause drama down the line. I said if they all agree to roll then it’s what they want and it’s alright for their 10. I think all loot decisions cause drama. Loot council certainly does. People complain about the authority that decides whether or not they get loot.
27-02-10 – 24-manning voa instead of keeping a 25th member with low dps. Why? ‘he needs to learn sometime’, he sucked, gear sucked, he pulled, didn’t know where the instance was, etc.
20/21-03-10 – really want to try icc10 on neph since I got a 4-piece bonus of t-10. I got in one yesterday that looked to be a really nice group, some people from Vintage, Nellu from GW. They were inviting people who had been to Sindragosa and knew fights to there, so I whispered and said that I’d cleared through Valithria on a main, and they invited probably because they needed a rogue. So that would have been my ticket to downing some new bosses maybe or seeing some new bosses. We took at least an hour to fill the group because there were like 5 pugs forming at once. When we finally pugged it, we all got to ICC, and the raid leader says, “well shit. I have to go. My gf’s coming over.” He offers to find a replacement and while he’s doing that, 1 dps leaves. Then he tells us the replacement and leaves. So we have a full group minus 2 dps, and then people start leaving! I’m like wait! It’s just a couple DPS, we’ve been waiting for an hour! Let’s go find 2 more, it’ll take 5 minutes! But alas, it wasn’t meant to be. It’s really irritating when people wait and wait and wait, and then instead of doing just a little more work to get things moving, they bail. It’s like okay, you’ve waited an hour for nothing. Or, you could wait an extra 5 minutes and get icc10. You’ve already wasted an hour sitting there, so what’s a couple more minutes? If you leave then it really is a waste of time. If you stay, It’s partially salvaged.
Anyway, so while I was waiting around, I read some for class and I went back and watched videos and read strats for Valithria (from dps perspective), blood council, and putricide. The cool thing about that is today I logged on and immediately got in a similarly good (maybe better) icc group! We’re trying to get 2 tanks and 1 more healer at the moment, but hopefully it won’t take an hour and hopefully people won’t start bailing.
I really like icc 10 groups because they’re faster and I feel like I have a better chance to see new content. One reason I raid is the thrill of killing a boss and seeing new content. It’s exciting to run up to a new boss, to wipe over and over on it, to learn it, and to finally have everything come together to kill it.
01-04-10
Today we did a 25 ICC and just had to pug 2. Yesterday we did 2 10s because we would have had to pug like 5 or 6. We stomped Marrowgar, wiped once on Deathwhisper because people weren’t focusing or something. I died because I’d been hit by frostbolts and something else and then got a DnD cast right on me and I couldn’t get out in time. Anyway, killed Gunship and killed Saurfang beautifully. We went to Festergut and had two nice attempts.
What this entry is about then is healing assignments. Festergut does massive raid damage that turns into massive tank damage as the fight goes on, and it cycles like this, raid, tank, raid, tank, until he’s dead. We usually have healing assignments on most bosses to ensure tanks and raid members are getting enough heals on them. People are supposed to stick to their assignments, focus on keeping those people or that person up, and if they are able, help out in other areas. So, if I’m assigned to heal a tank, I make sure that tank is topped off all the time. As a paladin, I can beacon the tank and heal other people, which will beacon heal the tank, so I can help out with other heals easily and not lose focus on my assignment. However, if it’s a heavy tank damage fight like Festergut, I’ll end up focusing only on the tank since there’s basically a global cooldown stop between the heal and the beacon heal, which can be deadly.
In this fight, Ceezy was supposed to make sure the ranged groups were getting heals. Festergut is a dps race, so the dps need not to die. Range especially need to not die since we have to have a certain number of them alive and ranged so that Festergut doesn’t cast vomit on the melee and heals. So anyway, we lost like 4 ranged and he eventually enraged and killed us. When we were coming back, Psykh goes through healing assignments again, and after he’d gone through them, asks Ceezy which group he’s healing. Ceezy has a tendency to have an attitude especially if he feels he’s accused of something. So Ceezy didn’t answer Psykh, which for Psykh confirms that Ceezy wasn’t paying attention. Ceezy got all defensive, like Shut the fuck up, don’t tell me what to do, I know who I’m healing. Why do you always have to call me out, why don’t you ever call out anyone else, always Ceezy. Psykh brought up that half of Ceezy’s charges had died so he in fact didn’t know who to heal. Ceezy responded by saying he was highest on the healing meters and so he knows what he’s doing. It was a huge scene in Vent.
Healing assignments are to organize heals so that people stay alive. If healers don’t follow their assignment, others have to pick up slack, which strains their own healing assignments, and so on. Ceezy’s claim that he knew what he was doing based on the meters showing he healed the most show that in Ceezy’s mind, healing output was more descriptive of a good job than who exactly was healed. For a holy paladin, that’s like saying when my tank dies, “well I healed the most, it’s not my fault.” I’m still responsible for my tank. Healers are responsible for the most part for their assignments. If someone in Ceezy’s group dies, it’s not because I didn’t heal that person because I was presumably focused on my tank or someone else. Your healing assignments are your priority, and for the group to succeed, everyone has to deal with their priorities.
Mana pool is a symbol of how geared/good a healer you are. If I glance at a character, I note mana pool, and if they have a ton, I’m impressed on first sight, like wow, they’re geared, they’re probably good. Players often stack stats for utility, like a warrior stacking armor pen or a paladin stacking strength. These attributes though are invisible unless you’re looking at meters. You can’t see armor pen when you look at a character. What you can see are HP and mana. Mana is certainly important for healers, and intelligence is the most important stat for holy paladins. Still, it bothers me when holy paladins stack intelligence gems at the expense of everything else. We had a holy paladin pug in our group today with over 40k mana. I top off at like 36.5k. I was like damn, 40k! Then I looked at his gear and it was pretty good, but like 5500 or so gearscore, compared to my 5900. What happens is these people stack one thing, don’t take any socket bonuses, so that on first glance, the giant mana pools make people gawk. Then you inspect them and find they’ve sacrificed spell power, mp5, haste, crit and stam for pure intellect. 40k is overkill, for real. He might have 3k more mana than me, but I heal faster, harder, crit way more, regen more mana, and have more stamina. And holy paladins never go out of mana anyway, especially by the time you’re at like 35k. It just seems to me pointless to stack it so much to get an obscene amount, and it feels to me conspicuous showing off how much mana you can stack.
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