The Bottom End of the Learning Curve

In Which the

DWARVEN BATTLE MEDIC

Comes to the

STARTLING AND EMBARRASSING REALIZATION 

That he has Been Playing his Class

LIKE A TOTAL NUBCAKE.

Mists of Pandaria has introduced a lot of changes to all the classes, as is normal with any expansion. When Cataclysm launched I spent hours obsessively scouring each PTR patch note and news release for any change. So I had a pretty clear idea of how the rather fundamental changes to the game, and healing in particular, would play out. 

Come Mists and I did none of that. In fact, since it's launch I've spent far more time in my Protection Levelling/Questing/Pull-Twenty-Mobs-And-Mow-Them-Down spec than I have healing.

So the past few weeks have been spent not only in a frenzied effort to raise my gear level from its former barely-enough-for-LFR level to something that wouldn't completely embarrass me in a normal mode Throne of Thunder 10-Man, but it's also been a steep learning curve to fully understand my class again.

Big things like Talents I had a pretty decent grasp on, at least in the broad strokes, but in reading up on them in the excellent Bossypally Talent Guide I realized that some of my choices were less than optimal. Particularly Hand of Purity, which had been transformed from middling to awesome since the beginning of the expansion, a talent that I had never really considered before that I now consider an essential tool.

I also didn't fully appreciate the effect that normalizing Mana would have on Paladins. In all previous expansions, Intellect was a Paladin's no-brainer, don't-even-think-of-gemming-anything-else-dumbass, best Stat. Not so for Mists. Now the once lamented Spirit is a Holy Paladin's best friend, to the point that the once useless Blue Gems are pretty much all I need now. That was a head-scratcher when I first read about it, let me tell you, and it went against two expansions worth of common sense.

Similarly, Mastery is now such a viable gearing strategy that Ask Mr. Robot considers it the default way to build a Holy Paladin, relegating a Haste-heavy build to the status of the Ugly Cousin that ain't quite right in the head.

I admit, I took the lazy route this expansion: at the start of Mists I didn't do much in the way of homework on my class, and just kept gearing and gemming and playing the same way I had in Cataclysm.

But there's nothing like a Raid Boss to quickly show a person just how bad the lazy way is.


FEET WET IN THE THRONE OF THUNDER

Staring a progression boss in the face for the first time
in a long time. Please ignore the skeletons.

I have officially been a Raider again for three weeks now. My new guild Acquired Taste is full of excellent people who were more than willing to help me get geared up, as well as hand-hold me as I learned the new fights. Their help, as well as some getting some long-awaited good loot-luck in LFR, has seen my iLVL rise from 476 to 501 in three short weeks, still on limited play-time. I'm managing to keep up with the other healers, despite my still-inferior gear.

But lordy, it's been a challenge. Walking on to a raid team that had three bosses on farm that I had never before encountered or even studied, being expected to contribute in a meaninful way and not hold the raid back, all while sporting several blues and one or two PVP gear pieces. Not to mention that this is a brand new guild for me and I'm still in my probation period, so if I don't impress I run the risk of losing not just my raid spot but potentially my new guild as well. But hey, no pressure, right?

In the end I think I've done pretty well. The first week we downed Tortos for the first time, and we followed it up with a last pull of the night, three-people-left-standing Megaera kill the week after. Our third week saw Ji-Kun fall, with the Battle Medic on nest-healing duties.


FEELIN' GROOVY

It's felt great to be back raiding again. The people I'm with are great, the Throne of Thunder raid is excellent and it's nice to finally be caught up with the game again and to feel like I've got things under control.

What? Patch 5.3 dropped today? It's got a whole bunch of new stuff to figure out, two new epic questlines and dozens more dailies to do?

Son of a bitch.

The Long Road Back

In Which the

DWARVEN BATTLE MEDIC

Attempts to Reconcile

CERTAIN LAMENTABLE EVENTS 

and Makes a 

FATEFUL DECISION.

For reasons that I cannot quite understand, this expansion hasn't really caught my imagination. Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of really great things about this expansion; I'm really impressed with the levelling experience, for example, and the visuals are spectacular—probably the best that WoW has ever done. Mists of Pandaria has humour, great stories and a lot of things to do. But it just hasn't captured me: I like Pandaria, but I'm not really excited about Pandaria. And I don't know why.

Actually, I think I can make a guess. I think it has something to do with the fact that I have no goal to achieve this expansion.

Once I hit 90 I simply felt lost. Run a few heroics, get some decent gear, start running LFR. Once that was done, then what? Dailies? To what end? What is the point of gearing up a character if not to raid? It becomes rather like a girl dressing up in her best ballgown, twirling in front of her mirror night after night because she knows she's never going to get the chance to go to the dance.

At the risk of beating the same old dead horse and paraphrasing real-life Forsaken zombie James Carville, "IT'S THE RAIDING, STUPID".

Since January when some tumultuous real-life changes hit the Battle Medic household, I have essentially been taking a sabbatical from my Paladin. I've spent very little time playing WoW since then, and the vast majority of it has been on various different Alts on various different servers. Alt levelling, low level PVP, dipping my foot in the dark side of Horde levelling. Basically anything other than logging onto my main.

THE LOW POINT

So imagine my surprise when I finally do log in only to discover that my guild has transferred servers. And they went Horde as well. Double whammy.

It was a surprise, to say the least. The letter that is automatically sent from Blizzard is a terse slap in the face as far as notifications go. In fairness to the guild, I wasn't around so it's certainly not their fault that I didn't know—the website had plenty of info and I'm sure it was discussed at length in Mumble. So I don't blame them and wish them all the best on Mal'Ganis as damned, dirty Hordies.

But it did leave me feeling rather abandoned and alone. And it got me wondering whether or not I still enjoy this game enough to be paying my fifteen bucks a month for the privilege.

Blues just ain't gonna cut it anymore.

As it turns out, fuck yeah! I do.

Time to get back to work and start gearing in preparation for raiding. I'm way behind and I've got a long way to go, but damn, I'm looking forward to the challenge. I've just joined up with a new guild that has a late-night raid team that should work around the Dwarfling's schedule, and importantly, seem like fun people to be around. A fresh start, so to speak.

Look for more from Battle Medic in the very near future. I'm certain I'm going to have a lot to talk about.

Scribblings of the Clueless Noob

"There are old heads in the world who cannot help me by their example or advice to live worthily and satisfactorily to myself; but I believe that it is in my power to elevate myself this very hour above the common level of my life." - Henry David Thoreau

Earlier this month I wrote a rather long essay on the feelings of burn-out that I've been dealing with lately in which I offered ten different things to do to combat them. For those of you with the fortitude to actually read through all 3300 words, I congratulate you; that post was a monster.

Like many people, I don't always follow my own advice. As I was writing that post and thinking about the different things I could do to clear my head and find a happy place with WoW again, I realized that at the time I wasn't really doing any of them. Oh sure, I was playing a different game and taking a bit of a break—which was what the post was all about, after all—but the other things I talked about were merely theoretical. So I figured that I should put a few of those ideas into practice and see what happened.


SCRIBBLING ON THE CAVE WALL

I'm not sure anyone has noticed but I have been on a bit of a posting renaissance lately. This post marks the fourth post in January, two more than I managed in the whole of October, and I still have two more posts that I would like to get done this month. It seems as if my brain has a WoW infection and has been using my fingers to vomit all over my blog. Gross.

I started out this year with the idea of getting Battle Medic back to where I'd like it to be by posting smaller posts more frequently. Ideally I'd like to get back to doing about ten to twelve posts per month, so the frequency is better but still not where I would like it. The length, on the other hand, I've failed utterly and completely. So far in 2012 (not including this post), I have written over 5700 words and seem completely incapable of keeping a post under 1000. I guess we'll see how this one turns out, although with the amount of things that seems to get added in as I go I'm not hopeful—I'm already at 400!

Either way, writing about WoW is a wonderfully self-sustaining process.  I've got more to write about WoW because I've been writing about WoW, which in turn makes me more interested in WoW and makes it easier to write about WoW. It's a positive feedback loop that has done wonders in making me feel better.


LOOK AT ME! I'M THE CLUELESS NOOB AT THE BOTTOM OF THE DPS CHART

Virtually every second of my WoW experience at maximum level has been spent healing. My first max-level character was a healing priest, the main that I ended Wrath with was my Holy Paladin and now, as Cataclysm draws to a close I've added a Resto Shaman to the mix as well. I love healing, and I have no plans to stop doing it any time soon, but in retrospect, my entire WoW career has been extraordinarily one-dimensional.

Oh sure, I've fooled around with other roles. I even managed to get my warrior tank into a couple of raids back in Wrath—an experiment that ended rather badly, I might add. Retribution, likewise, was used for levelling and then discarded upon reaching level 85. My Paladin has been unable to kill anything efficiently by himself ever since. I am the guy that always hears, "Oh, Fannon's on so we've got a healer" when he logs into Mumble. Simply put, healing has been the absolute focus of my attention for a long time now. And even as experienced as I am I still find it challenging and realized there is a lot for me to learn and improve upon.

However, doing the same thing for two years can get a bit monotonous. Imagine eating the same sandwich for lunch everyday for two years; I don't think you'd end up looking forward to the noon hour if that same damned ham on pumpernickel with yellow mustard was the only option. I think at least some of the reason that I was feeling burnt-out in the first place was because every time I was in a group setting I was doing the same thing that I always did.

And so I decided to do something completely different—for me, at least. I dusted off my badly geared, poorly understood Enhancement off-spec on my Shaman and took it for a spin in some dungeons and the raid finder.

Oh my, what a different world. As a healer, I have the luxury to say away from the boss where it's relatively quiet and I can play undisturbed. Not possible in melee range. It's wonderfully chaotic; at times the sheer amount of spell effects that are going off completely obscure both the mob I'm hitting and my character.  It feels odd trusting the health of the party to someone else, and I get damned nervous when my health dips. But then I realize that I'm only DPS, so I'm expendable, which makes me giggle to myself and want to hit the boss even harder.

I suck at it though. Yes, I am that noob at the bottom of the DPS meters in that heroic you're doing. Yes, I am in your dungeon group wearing that gear, horrible as it is. You'd better believe that I'm the one standing in fire or accidentally pulling mobs or doing any one of a hundred things that would make me pull my hair out if I were healing me. Yup, that's me.

And yes, I'm laughing the whole time I'm doing it. Sorry.

But I'm really enjoying whacking things with my giant beer steins. I'm enjoying the new challenge and the new responsibilities (or lack thereof) that come with dealing damage. It's given me something completely different to look forward to when I log into the game.

I'm still raiding as a healer, and it will always be my first, passionate love. But, if I can encourage infidelity to the game itself, why not cheat on my preferred role, too?

After all, unlike real life, in the gaming world, monogamy isn't good for the soul.

This post weighs in at 1029 words (not including the opening quote or this postscript). Close enough to call this one a win for brevity.

Images of Azeroth: 50,000 Words (Introduction)

November is National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo); a month where the English language (among others) is tortured, abused, slapped, tickled and polished by thousands of prospective novelists in mostly abortive attempts to write the Next Great Novel. The goal is ambitious: Write 50,000 words within the month of November.

I admire anyone who has the stones to attempt such a herculean task and am in bewildered awe of anyone who actually finishes it. Personally, I would love to attempt it; as with most anyone else on the Internet, I have an idea for a novel that has never seen the light of day. But if I am to be honest with myself, I don't think I would ever be able to properly dedicate myself to it and so it would end up being yet another project that I've taken on which never sees completion. I have enough of those already; anyone remember the Through Your Interface challenge?

However, Angelya over at Revive and Rejuvenate has come up with another Challenge that I, as a Photographer and self-styled Visual Artist, am very excited about. It's IntPiPoMo, or International Picture Posting Month. As a picture is worth 1,000 words, the goal for this challenge is to post 50 pictures during the month of November.

This is right up my alley.

So here we go. It's the 5th today, so I'll be posting 2 images per day for the remainder of November. But of course, it wouldn't be a true Battle Medic challenge if I didn't have some kind of unique spin on it. So rather than simply posting 50 different screenshots of our favourite virtual world, I will be posting 25 Images of Azeroth and 25 photographs or art projects that I have been working on personally (and no baby photos, sorry ladies). As well, I will be posting commentary and context with each image.

Look for the first post a little later today.

As well, on a personal note, I hope to get back to posting more regularly than I have been lately. Two posts a month on Battle Medic is unacceptable to me. I really appreciate those of you who have stuck around and kept checking the blog during this little unannounced and unexpected hiatus. Look for a lot of action here at Battle Medic over the next little while!

Images 1 and 2: Darkshore and Sturgeon Fog
Images 3 and 4: Grim Batol and Sunset in Copper
Images 5 and 6: Scoured Reaches and Pines #3
Images 7 and 8: Halls of Reflection and Sunset in Motion
Images 9 and 10: Stormwind After Deathwing and Of Light and Darkness
Images 11 and 12: Badlands Tree and Untitled Abstract
Images 13 and 14: The Greymane Wall and Grain
Images 15 and 16: Ahn'Qiraj and The Dock
Images 17 and 18: Atramedes and a Family Portrait
Images 19, 20 and 21: Dalaran, Pines #4 and Bonus Dwarfling Pic
Images 22 and 23: Ironforge Airfield and Pines #4 Source
Images 24 and 25: Gnomus Dramaticus and Tanya