The One With The Slot Machine Fucking Yaks

There will be no pictures of slot machines doing naughty things to yaks in this post or vice versa, so if that’s why you clicked this link please know I’ve wasted your time.

My last post here is dated 5/26/14 and it was all about Wildstar. Until tonight, the last time I logged into WoW was just a few days after that post. So it has been roughly 6 weeks since I last spent 2 or 3 hours riding around in a circle on the Timeless Isle and watching for the Ironfur Steelhorn yak to appear. Because that’s all I had been doing in WoW for quite some time. That fucking yak is the last rare I need to complete the Timeless Champion achievement and HAS been the last rare I’ve needed for a long time. I had slowly gotten obsessed.

It started innocently enough. I’d login to Elfi, harvest & replant my garden, fly out to the Isle and spend 30ish minutes killing shit and gathering coins. Then I’d either do some LFR with Elfi or I’d switch over to one of my alts and do some stuff. A few months back I realized I was close to finishing the legendary cloak quest line & I stopped spending time on alts and spent most of my time logged into Elfi on the Timeless Isle waiting for the LFR queue. I had always been on the lookout for the Ironfur Steelhorn, but at this point I started hunting him more seriously. I’d use the windfeather buff and run circles around the Celestial Court killing all the yaks, even the babies. By the time I finally did get my cloak & didn’t have to do any of that anymore, I had become addicted to the hunt.

I’m a gambler. Not in general; I don’t flip coins with friends to see who pays for dinner or take a chance on getting through stop lights that have been yellow for a few seconds. I mean I love me a fucking slot machine. Or anything fairly close to a slot machine – like those games at the fair where you drop a quarter in and hope it pushes more quarters off the edge for you. My eyes glaze over and I become irrational. It’s not that I go insane and start betting large amounts of money; I totally prefer penny slots because if you go to the casino with $100 you can play longer on penny slots. It’s amount of time played that’s my issue. I can’t quit playing. I don’t want to quit playing. I have gone on a spontaneous trip to the casino at like 11pm on a Friday night after working all day and will sit there blankly staring at a slot machine until 6am. There’s no way I could have stayed up that long doing anything else.

Lucky for me, I don’t live in Las Vegas or Atlantic City. The closest casinos to me are about an hour away, located on Indian land in Oklahoma. Not something I can just pop by on my way home from work. Also lucky for me, I love spending money. Which means I probably put more money into slot machines every couple of months than most people would, but also means when I set myself a limit of how much I’m going to spend I usually only hit the ATM once for an extra $80. 😛 [edited to clarify: I love spending money on all sorts of silly toys and games and trips and food, so I know better than to waste all of my extra income on the slots]

Restraint. I almost haz it.

Okay, do you see the connection here between the yak and the slot machine story? After I finished the legendary questline and didn’t need to queue LFR to get specific drops I started spending 4 or 5 hours a night doing nothing more than riding that same circle and killing those same yaks, even the babies. I quit gardening, I quit doing dailies, I quit logging into my alts. Never saw the bitch once – not even it’s corpse.

Queue recent 6 week(ish) absence from WoW. Tonight I had some extra time and was excited to be able to login to Elfi and spend some time in this game I love so much. Hey guess what? I’ve done nothing other than hunt the yak. Right back into the same pattern EXCEPT TONIGHT SOMETHING DIFFERENT HAPPENED as you can see by the below image.

Obviously that’s from my Twitter feed so you read bottom to top. You know the drill. Yep, that totally happened. In minutes. But did it make me want to rage quit? Nope. At this point, the Ironfur Steelhorn is like a slot machine to me. I might as well start calling it my Brokeback Mountain because I can’t fucking quit it. Just like when I’m playing the slots I can’t help but think the next push of the button may be the big one. The next yak I see may be the one I need. The next $0.40 bet I make may win me $500. The next loop I make around the Celestial Court may put me face to face with him.

That’s what WoW has been reduced to for me. I can’t imagine doing anything else in game until this achievement is complete.

/cry

The One Where I Wonder What’s Wrong With Me

This is nothing new, I wonder this all the time. But it’s back on my mind thanks to the news that patch 5.2 will be released in a couple of weeks and I am not prepared for it. Again. As usual. I would love to figure out why I stay so behind. I spend A LOT of hours logged into this game over the course of a week and still I’ve never capped Valor, don’t remember to tend my farm every day, have yet to step foot in LFR, only run an average of 2 heroics a week, still don’t have my Cloud Serpent mount, etc. etc. The list goes on and on.

I can’t blame it on transmogging because I only have 1 (recently completed) transmog outfit for 1 character. I can’t blame it on pet battles because I only have 1 team formed and they are at level 15ish. As far as dailies go, I hit exalted with the Tillers and got everyone to be my best friend very early on but since then the only other rep I’ve completed is Golden Lotus. I haven’t even started several of them. And this is my main, Elfindale, I’m talking about. I have a level 90 on the Horde side who’s accomplished nothing more than opening up all the farm plots. And no, I don’t tend my farm every day on that toon either, thanks for asking.

What the fuck do I do with my time in-game? It’s something I’ve been asking myself for the past 5 years. There is something about WoW that causes me to develop situational ADD, I swear (does not affect me when I do heroics or actual raiding). I log in with no sense of “first this, then this, then this” and I find myself mousing over other players in the area because I like what they’re wearing or to see the name of the mount they’re riding. Then I check my mail. Then I stare at Accountant for 5 minutes and wonder why I don’t make more gold than I do (psst.. it’s because I don’t do enough dailies or heroics or anything at all really).

Then I fuck around with all the stupid shit I carry in my bags that I have no use for but cannot bring myself to delete because OMG THE NOVELTY OF THIS THING (I’m looking at you, Ancient Amber). Then I go to the bank and organize it and look at all the stupid shit I have in there which I have no use for. I stand there several minutes and contemplate deleting things. Then I realize I should be doing something, so I head out to the Shrine’s patio and survey the vast land of opportunity before me. Then I pull up my bags again and wonder if I should store some of the useless crap in the bank with the other useless crap (volatile orbs, landsharks, ugh). I’m also chatting with the guild and/or real ID friends during all of this, which likely slows me down a hair but I will never stop doing. In fact, I would love to have more real ID friends for chatting. Battletag Elfi#1350. Hit me up.

Now where was I? Oh that’s right, standing around not accomplishing anything. I tab out to catch up on Twitter. Tab back in. Remember I wanted to look up how to get that cool object/mount/gear/pet, tab back out to google it. Read every comment on WoWhead just because they’re there. Tab back in. Catch up on guild chat. Scroll through last few minutes of general and trade for God knows what reason. Oh hey, I should fly out to the farm. Take flightpath, tab out to catch up on Twitter. Jump into a Twitter conversation and get ignored (off-subject, but it happens to me a lot). Tab back into game & forget why I flew to this spot. Hearth to Shrine. Immediately remember I was going to farm. /facepalm. Take flight path back. Decide I should gather some herbs while I’m in the area. Spend the next 30 minutes alternating between gathering herbs and tabbing back out to see if I’m actually going to get a reply on Twitter. Spoiler alert: I usually don’t.

Tab back into game, decide I’m tired of gathering herbs. Hearth back to Shrine. DAMMIT I WAS GOING TO FARM. Maybe I should actually run a heroic or do something useful. Queue for heroic, fly to farm. Decide I would be better off working on my DK alt because I really want her to be at 90 before patch 5.2 drops. Switch to DK alt without ever taking care of my farm. Quest on DK alt for a few minutes then decide to head to Stormwind to see if I can make money playing the AH. Stare at AH for 20 minutes and realize I don’t have enough starting capital to do much playing on the AH. Head back out to quest. Decide I should have looked for cool transmog stuff for my DK because everyone needs to be transmogged at level 70, right? Hearth back to Stormwind and look at AH some more. Reprimand myself for not leveling faster, head back out for questing.

By this time, I haven’t eaten dinner, haven’t done any exercising, need to get ready for work and once again, accomplished nothing. I mean, obviously I’m exaggerating this a bit (no, not really) and not every day is quite this ridiculous (but close). I’m seriously considering actually writing out a daily action plan. Something along the lines of:
1. login to Elfindale, immediately queue for heroic
2. while waiting on queue, immediately fly to farm and ACTUALLY TEND FARM
3. if still waiting on heroic queue, do Klaxxi dailies (I’m close to exalted with them, amazingly)
4. While flying to Dread Wastes, pick herbs
5. After heroic, login to Krisstalys (lvl 90 Horde) and tend farm
6. Login to Morrissa (DK alt I want to get to 90) and queue for random dungeon
7. while waiting for dungeon, complete quests

It seems silly that I would need to write down such simple things and I often wonder if I would even actually follow the plan if I did ever write it up. It’s not like I’m incapable of intelligent thought, I should be able to just do these things because I know they need to be done. Which is why I swear WoW triggers some sort of attention deficit for me. I just don’t seem to be able to resist getting distracted by all the shiny things.

I am curious if any others out there find they have a similar issue OR if any of you have some advice on how you manage to do more in 2 hours a night than I do in 4 hours a night. I’m not even kidding, I want to know. Because I’m really disappointed that I probably won’t have my DK to 90 before the patch and that a new raid will once again come out before I ever see the current raid. I need to figure out how to play more efficiently. Sometimes I wonder if it’s because both of my level 90 toons are Balance druids and as such, they are not exactly lean, mean killing machines. I’ve always sworn I hate melee and have no interest in bear or cat but since I’ve been working on my death knight so much recently, I’m starting to change my opinion about melee a bit. Maybe I should consider a bear off-spec for Elfi so that dailies and other general things would go quicker. I often wonder if the fact that everything – including killing vermin on my farm – takes so damn long and is so painful sort of subconsciously keeps me from running out there and doing what I need to do. Of course, I’m not in the best gear thanks to my lack of gathering Valor and my absence from heroics and LFR. And there’s a terrible cycle to be stuck in… without gear I suck, because I suck I don’t do the things that could get me gear. Awesome.

What do you guys do to maximize your efficiency in game? How many people think druids suck? What advice can you guys give me on overcoming this problem?

Lunar Festival Madness: Why Am I Doing This Again?

In-game holidays are fun, right? (Sidenote: how the hell is that dude riding his wind serpent upside down? [not an innuendo])

When the achievement “What A Long, Strange Trip It’s Been” went live in September 2009 I immediately began doing all the things. I actually got the achievement pretty quick, though if I remember right I had to wait for the second Love Is In The Air to roll around because I missed one of the elements the first time. I was actually trying to verify the dates a few minutes ago by viewing my achievements, but I don’t believe they’re displaying correctly. If they are, then I actually completed this the first time through each event.

EITHER WAY, the point is I haven’t done the Lunar Festival in it’s entirety since then. I mean, if I happen across an Elder I will stop and get free xp or gold depending on my character, but I haven’t bothered to fly all the places and track them all down in years. However this year the Lunar Festival happens to coincide with me making a big effort to level up my DK. She’s around the lvl 64, 65 mark so when the event began I thought to myself “self, you should fly around the lands and get that free xp. It will be easier than leveling and will fit right in to your lazy lifestyle.” Of course, I still have other toons to take care of, so I’m not devoting all of my time to it but I’ve been chasing down Elders for a few hours a day the past 3 days and I’m really starting to question if it’s worth it. I mean, I’m not max level so in enemy territory the NPCs are kicking my ass. In the higher level Northrend and Cataclysm zones, any old regular mob I get too close to is kicking my ass. As a DK I basically went from Eastern Plaguelands to Hellfire Peninsula so even though we start off with a lot of flight paths already known to us, most of my maps aren’t opened up to show location names. This means I’m spending a lot of time tabbed out to look up coordinates for the majority of the elders. So between the repair bills and all the wasted time running back to my body, flying across the land and tabbing out every 3 minutes I’m beginning to wonder why I’m doing this. I am pretty sure if I had stayed in Nagrand and continued questing this entire time, I’d be leveling much faster. Although I will say I am enjoying grabbing all of the mining nodes I come across.

Oh that’s right. I’m doing it for the Lunar Lantern. Never mind the rant, totally worth it.

image credit goes to WarcraftPets.com http://www.warcraftpets.com/wow-pets/magic/lanterns-and-lamps/lunar-lantern/

Also, I am now realizing I should do this on one of my Horde toons to get that pet as well. But I can guarantee I will use the level 90 for that adventure.

The One Where I Join A New Guild & Rant About Tempest Keep

Gather ’round, everyone. I have an announcement to make. As you can see by the magical floating text being displayed above my head, I have joined a new guild. Some of you may recall I recently mentioned I was casually looking for a new guild to be … err, casual in … and I am happy to report I have found myself a new home. The wonderful people at Business Time graciously allowed me to spend a couple of weeks with them on an alt so we could get to know each other and I could gauge if there was more social activity during the main hours I am logged into the game than there was in my current guild. I am happy to report they didn’t immediately hate me and they are indeed more chatty and have more people online at once than I had been previously experiencing. On Saturday night they offered to let me make them my new, permanent home. I moved Elfindale over that night and have really enjoyed seeing all the good-natured guild chat and how they all pick on each other. So while I always get a little sad and totally feel bad when I leave a guild behind, I can’t help but be excited to have a more social experience now. Thank you, Business Time, for letting me hang with you guys.

In other news, I am frustrated. Can you tell? Even though my friend Grace can easily solo Tempest Keep (and in fact, last week she finally got the Ashes of Al’ar mount. YAY!) and has explained her method to me in vent I am still going in there and dying repeatedly after I burn all the weapons down and the 4 asshats that are Kael’thas sidekicks make their way back to me. At the start of the fight, I am running back to the entrance & downing those 4 in varying intervals between the entrance and Kael’s room, but as they all come back to life once the weapons are dead I just am unable to do anything else. Even with the staff equipped and being used, I stay stunned, disoriented, silenced with no chances to heal myself or throw more than one or two instant spells until finally I’m dead. I read on the forums that there seems to be a bug where the buff from the staff does not work and others have experienced the same problem I am having. But it’s odd that I would get that bug every time and Grace never saw it once. Stupid Undead Priests. 😛

Oh Come On, Blizzard. So Not Fair.

Ground is too uneven to pet battle

The One Where I’m Simultaneously Proud And Ashamed Of Myself

I am a very easy-going person. I am shy and awkward, yes, but at the same time I like to constantly be surrounded by friends. These days most of my closer friends (thanks to video games) are not near my geographically, so I guess that should be amended to say I like to constantly be in communication with friends. I hate to upset people, which unfortunately does make me a bit passive/aggressive. I know that’s considered bad and I really try to stay aware of when I’m doing it and bring it to a halt. Luckily for my parents and siblings, most of my passive/aggressiveness is used on them. My point is, I try to be nice at all times because I am a nice person. I have a lot of patience, I’m very accepting, I am always willing to adapt to others, and I venture through life with a great sense of humor.

These things probably tend to make people think I’m a pushover; and I’ll admit I am one of those people who seems to be invisible a lot in the outside world. I’m the one who people step in front of at the counter even though I had been in line waiting. Or the one who finds the door shutting in my face thanks to the person who just held it open for the 3 people directly ahead of me. People talk over me. People forget to introduce me. But it’s not because I’m all withdrawn in on myself and looking at the ground. It’s because I’m one of those people who will automatically stay a bit back away from the counter in case someone decides they really need up there first. I’m the one who will start to hesitate as I approach a door being held open because I want the person holding the door to be able to make the decision to be finished holding the damn door. Does that make sense? I put everyone’s needs (needs that I imagine they have, because most of the time they are total strangers) above my own. But it’s not because I don’t feel I’m worth it. It’s because I think you’re worth it. True story. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. It works out for me only about .005% of the time, but I still try.¹

I’m not trying to toot my own horn here. I just wanted to point out how I view myself (because seriously, I’m sure there are people around who would disagree with my previous statements. Even I can’t please all the people all the time. Though I do try my hardest.) before posting the below screenshot of a conversation I just initiated in WoW. We all know that internet anonymity can turn any average nerd into a troll. Well there are times when I find myself pissed off at some random person in-game. It’s not very often and it usually involves them ninja’ing (made that word up right there, yo) a node I’m going for. The reason that will piss me off is because I never race anyone towards a node. I see someone in the general area and I’ll just stand and wait to see if that’s what they’re going for. [See second paragraph for reference]. So after inconveniencing myself that way for long periods of time it will occasionally hit me the wrong way when someone takes my shit.

And when that happens, this type of thing happens:

I hate when I do this. It’s like I don’t have the balls to just be outright mean but I am to the point where I want them to acknowledge they wronged me. I hold back from outright asshattery (or try to) because Elfi is known publicly by a small crowd and I don’t want that name tarnished. So it’s a combination of a few ranty sentences and a few passive aggressive sentences and it’s all pointless. I need to learn to just ignore it. These people are certainly ignoring me. But then, maybe that’s why I can’t ignore it. If someone grabbed a node from me and said “sorry” or “sucks to be you” or “take that fucker” as they ran away, I really think I’d get a good chuckle out of it. They knew I was there, they acknowledged that something has just happened. But to not say anything makes me feel like you haven’t even taken the time to acknowledge my existence and that burns my ass.

In closing, I really don’t know what the point of this post is. I just got wound up after the above conversation and started writing. I guess to feel like I’m serving a purpose here I will toss in a quick suggestion to everyone out there to tell me how I can improve the above conversation, or how I can train myself to not say anything, or even how you handle things of this nature. I can’t wait to see everyone’s take on this.

¹ Disclaimer: I am not saying I am like this all the time. I do have my bad days like everyone else. I can be grumpy, whiny, irritating, and everything else.

The One Where I Tell You Things. Important Things.

Do you know what I remember most about RIFT launching earlier this year? I remember how pissed off some people were that the WoW blogs they were following suddenly became inundated with posts about RIFT. While I’m not one who gets angry very often, I did understand (and mostly agree with) how annoying it was. Which is why I will be doing my Star Wars: The Old Republic blogging on a completely separate site. A site that will not be mentioned here, or linked to in any way. If you want to find me, you’re just going to have to stumble across me and hope you recognize my writing style. Hint: I will NOT be using “The One Where…” to start the majority of my posts, so don’t look for that. If you do find me, I may or may not confirm that you found me. Ha, this is fun already.

So why did I bring it up at all? Because I am not playing SWTOR in secret. I’m also not abandoning World of Warcraft or Elfi’s World because of it. But it is highly likely that between checking out a new game and the holiday season being upon us, things will slow down around here. I am not planning on cancelling my subscription to WoW (obviously i can’t promise that won’t change, but it will be a ways off if it does) and I know I’ll log in for some Winter Veil fun, so there will still be a few screenshots and observations going on here. I just wanted to give you a preemptive explanation about the cobwebs which you may soon notice gathering in the corners. Maybe I’ll play Star Wars for several weeks and decide it’s just not for me. Or maybe I’ll decide it’s all I ever wanted and I have lost interest in WoW. Hopefully, everything will go as I want it to and I will just be happy as hell with both games and split my time between the two. Whichever way it goes, I promise to make a statement about it here so that you all know what’s up. It always bothers me when a blog just stops abruptly and the loose ends aren’t tied up, makes me imagine bad things have happened.

Okay, we got that out of the way. Now onto other things. This just in – Elfindale, who has spent her entire life believing she was born to heal, is now officially a full-time laser chicken. It’s slightly disappointing, but necessary. There were a lot of factors involved. For one thing, I have been very unfocused while in-game for quite some time now (insert SWTOR here) and as a result I’m doing even more standing around Stormwind and simply chatting in guild chat than ever before. I have not been running dungeons so my gear is rapidly becoming outdated. My ability to heal is getting really rusty (insert recent story about wiping repeatedly and failing hard). And the most recent thing, the thing that actually caused me to have a meltdown Saturday morning and go off into a very rare rage (which lasted all of about 30 seconds)… I finally got all of the Darkmoon cards I needed to make a deck and get my Darkmoon Tsunami Card. Wait, why is that a bad thing? Maybe because when I combined them into a deck I got a Hurricane deck and not a Tsunami deck. INORITE? I COULDN’T BELIEVE IT EITHER. That’s probably the closest I’ve ever came to crying as a direct result of the game. Not counting that one time when my GM abandoned me like last week’s garbage.

So what do you do when after weeks of stress and frustration you end up with the wrong damn item? You take it as a sign. I suck at healing, my guild doesn’t need a healer, I don’t have a fucking Darkmoon Tsunami card trinket and at this point I hope to never lay eyes on one EVER. Ding! Switch to dps and enjoy a new laid back lifestyle. Luckily, our resident serious raider Boomkin was online at the time, so I asked her if the Darkmoon Hurricane trinket would be good for me to use for dps. She actually suggested the Volcano card instead. I immediately went to the AH, threw that damn Hurricane deck up for sale and purchased the Volcano trinket for about 7k. Done and done. I’m swearing off Darkmoon cards for good after this mess. But again, thanks to my guildie who put so much time and energy into crafting for me.

Let’s see, what else? I’ve gone another year without completing the Terokkar Turkey Time achievement during Pilgrim’s Bounty. How disappointing. I’m normally pretty OCD about completing holiday achievements, but just can’t seem to make myself complete this one. Maybe because a couple of years ago, when it was still a decent fight, I killed they guy but had forgotten to wear my stupid pilgrim hat and now I’m subconsciously avoiding the whole situation? Who knows. That’s just the way things seem to be going with me lately. If it ain’t one thing, it’s another. Good news is, as long as I have plenty of stupid stories about myself to tell you, I’ll just keep posting them here. Until then, may the force be with me.

The One Where The Darkmoon Tsunami Card Is Killing Me

Several weeks ago, I realized that I had somehow gotten Elfi’s gold up to around 50k. Now I’m sure that’s not a big number to a lot of you, but for someone who doesn’t log in daily and then doesn’t do very many dailies when I do log in, that’s quite a bit of money. And I realized that I was in a position to stop whining about being behind on gear and actually purchase some upgrades for myself from the auction house. So I ran up to Auctioneer Jaxon all excitedly and started searching for the first thing on my list – the Lightforged Elementium Hammer. I snapped it up for 12k and then immediately spent 1200g for the Power Torrent enchant. Next on my list was the Darkmoon Tsunami card and at the moment I was looking it up, the cheapest one on the market was 9000g. I hovered over the buyout button but couldn’t quite make myself click it. Sure, 15 minutes ago I had been all excited about spending money but now I was down almost 15k and I know there are people in my guild who do inscription. Maybe it wouldn’t hurt to see if I could get the card crafted for me. So I decided not to buy it and I asked in guild chat if anyone would be willing to help me get what I needed.

Two of my guildies immediately volunteered and I just picked the first one I typed in as my chosen crafter. We whispered each other some arrangements, she told me what mats she needed and she told me that when she creates a card it’s random, so it would likely take a bit of time to get what I needed. I said that’s fine and I sent her all the mats I currently had in my possession and then immediately struck out into the world to gather more. I spent the next several times I logged in farming herbs the entire time. Now this post is not a complaint in any way about my fellow guildie or the work she has done for me. What I’m complaining about here is me. For one thing, I am ridiculously stupid about so many things. I didn’t realize you had to collect a deck of Darkmoon cards in the proper element to turn in and get the relic card you needed. So after a few days, when I had gotten all sorts of five of embers, and three of winds, I didn’t realize I should be keeping certain ones of them. Luckily my friend assured me she hadn’t sent me any wave cards yet so I hadn’t accidentally gotten rid of any I needed. That was good news. But it clued me in to just how long of a process this might be and because I didn’t want to spend all of my time in-game farming herbs, I started buying whiptail and volatile life from the auction house.

I was putting the cards she created that I didn’t need up for auction and making a small bit of money back, but volatile lifes are pricey and since I needed 30 to have her create 1 card I was really knocking my gold down quickly. So I started farming herbs again. And for the entire 1 1/2 hours of gameplay I got in the evenings, I played leap frog with a bunch of assholes in Uldum trying to stock up on whiptail and volatile life. After a few more days of this, I once again got bored with it and started buying from the auction house again. I sold a few more extra cards that were crafted and by this time I had 4 of the cards I needed for my deck, but some of the cards I had for sale weren’t getting any hits. Money was still going out on hundreds of whiptail and volatile life, but money wasn’t always coming in. At this point it’s been around 2 weeks and I’m down to around 20k gold now. If you’ll refer back to the first paragraph, you’ll notice that after buying my new weapon and the enchant for it, I was roughly around 35k. So this means that not only have I seriously spent 12 or more hours logged into the game farming herbs nonstop, I had also spent about 15,000g buying the mats. Are you starting to realize I should have just spent the 9,000g for the Tsunami card that first day? Because trust me, I realized it. But my friend is not at fault and she’s putting a lot of work into doing me this favor. So I keep going. Or at least I intended to.

One day, over a week ago, I logged in and got to work farming herbs straight away and after about 30 minutes I just want to bang my head repeatedly on my keyboard. It’s mind-numbing when that’s all you’ve done for a few weeks. I said my goodbyes and logged out. Then I didn’t login for a week. I mean, I am a bit busier these days outside of the game with the hustle and bustle of the holidays, but I can’t even tell you how long ago it was when I went a week without logging in. So I finally convince myself to login again and in my mailbox I receive a few more ember cards and wind cards and a note saying more mats are needed. I did not immediately start farming. I did the cooking daily and the fishing daily and was just getting ready to take the portal to Hyjal for Firelands dailies when I realized, I didn’t even want to be logged in. I was so miserable, I didn’t even want to be there. Again, let me say I am not upset with my guildie at all for any of this. At no point did I tell her that I wanted to take a break from trying for the Tsunami card. She had no idea I was getting frustrated with myself. Also, I had just spent a weekend in the SWTOR beta and I had been pining away for the chance to get back in that game ever since. I realize I just need to log out and reset myself here.

But right before I do a couple of people in guild chat start discussing running one of the new 4.3 heroics. This was the first time I have been logged in since the patch, so obviously I had never ran any of the new ones. I was asked if I wanted to go but I declined based on my frustration level. But I like these guys, I really do, and when one of them started gently prodding me into running with them I finally agreed. Oh man, I was the Worst. Healer. Ever. I don’t even know which one we were in, but Lady Sylvanas was the first boss. Of course, I wiped us on the first trash pull before we ever got to her because I hadn’t healed in so long I couldn’t remember what my bindings were or what the hell I needed to click. Oops. Then we got through the first trash and on the second trash I let a dps or two die. Then I wiped us on Lady S about 10 seconds in the first time because I couldn’t move out of the purple stuff. I know this was a combination of being a bit rusty and being in a place over the past couple of weeks where I have not looked forward to even being in the game, but I’m so mortified at my horrible performance that I vow to teleport out and repair and then come back in and show them I’m not a total moron. Unfortunately, it didn’t go down the way I planned. After I repaired, I lost another dps. Rezzed him just in time to lose another dps and a finally another wipe. At this point I’m so pissed at myself for ruining this for everyone that my face is bright red and I’m pretty sure I’m going to puke. We gave it one more try and I let us all die so I finally told them I was going to leave group and let them pug a healer. I have never been so humiliated with myself. Sure, there are plenty of times I lose a dps or a tank or just wipe us all for stupid reasons. But I don’t think I’ve ever failed on every pull for 10 damn pulls in a row. And on our way in there they were telling me how easy these new heroics were. Gah! I blame this all on that damn Tsunami card and the unbearable amount of stress and frustration it has placed on both me and my stack of gold.

Sidenote: During my extended time in the auction house spending all of my money on materials I could have just went out and got myself for free, I did at least get a bit of entertainment.