The first is: where in the World of Warcraft is this?

The second is: when Blizzard poster Hortus wrote this …

Void Reaver intentionally no longer targets or faces players that he casts Arcane Orb on. This was done to fix a bug.

There is a bug in that there is currently no combat log message for him casting Arcane Orb (just the impact message), causing boss mods to not work. This will be fixed in a future patch.

… that’s complete bullshit, right? It’s not just me who thinks a boss flinging out 5k AE damage SECRETLY is crap? I can accept if they want to break boss announcement mods for some reason which only their leetness can understand, and I can accept that raiders have to watch the boss targeting to see who’s going to be the lucky one to take an orb to the face, but they (the royal Developers They) can’t have it both ways.

And why weren’t INTENTIONAL changes to a boss encounter IN THE PATCH NOTES? That’s why I suspect Hortus was given a line of bull to get rid of him and his pesky Void Reaver questions.

Those are all secondhand reports too, by the way. We haven’t been to Tempest Keep since the patch so I don’t know firsthand what’s going on. I only know that much because of the updates on the Deadly Boss Mods page.

And the third question is: Joining and leaving ten guilds in under one year is a lot, isn’t it?

Remember the lastest Love Between Crazies drama in my guild from a few weeks back? Paladin man-whore #1 had left our guild because his (latest) in-game romance had gone sour and the object of his affections had chosen another paladin man-whore in our guild. About a week after I told you about that nonsense, she told us that we “didn’t appreciate her” and left the guild too.

And what does “we don’t appreciate her” mean anyhow? I suspect it means we didn’t shower 150% of our attention on her.

Whatever. See ya. Then she pressured PRESSURED paladin man-whore #2 to leave the guild also and join her new guild so they could game happily ever after. Now that part was a shame because he was a good player and a fine raider, but that’s how these things go.

Because I’m a shit, I did a little research and checked out her guild history on WarcraftRealms.com and discovered that she had joined and left ten guilds in under one year on our server alone — she had transferred here from another server and Lord knows how many guilds she chewed through over there.

Ya ya, I know. I should have checked the guild history BEFORE we let her in the door, but when your paladin man-whore comes to you with his helm in his hand and asks you to guild his PVP honey, you’d say yes too.

Well. Both man-whore and I learned a lesson with that one, because she’s dumped him and is coupled with one of their officers in eternal two-week gaming bliss and man-whore got /gkicked at her behest.

The biggest shame of all: we didn’t get even one naked picture from her.

While I was wasting what would be otherwise productive work hours on the World of Warcraft forums, I ran across a post detailing a Horde prank on the Mal’Ganis server by the guild Goon Squad, Elitist Jerks’ little feeder guild. (Hell, probably on that server, every guild is an EJ feeder guild.)

Basically, they ran Jaina Proudmoore, archmage extraordinaire of Theramore, over to Orgrimmar to visit with her good buddy Thrall — all the while she teleported players and NPCs to Theramore and did her whole routine with the elementals and blizzards and general mageish chaos.

Here’s the YouTube video, which is typical game video quality (i.e. bad) and you can’t really see anything, but just the idea of the prank is enough for me.

At the end of the video, there’s a short plug for joining Goon Squad and here’s the real entertainment: Real life $$ to join and belong to a guild, with several tiers of membership, of course. Consideration for a slot in EJ will run you $50 a month, by the way. (Pssst, plus the $25 application fee.)

Taking them at their word, 1200 accounts paying the bronze membership (those cheap asses!) is $12,000 a month gross.

Joke or not, the IRS has used the anal microscopes over less.

Hunter: Hey! How come our target macros don’t work on these totems? (The /target corrupted macro from the Halazzi fight)

Raid Leader: Ummm …

Warlock: Because these aren’t corrupted lightning totems?

Hunter: Oh.

I’ll bet he still doesn’t understand why his macro was “broken”.

Life Tap: This spell now has only 3 ranks. Each now costs a fixed percentage of maximum health to cast, and grants the same fixed percentage of maximum mana: Rank 1 is 5%, Rank 2 is 12%, and Rank 3 is 20%.

If you don’t pay attention to warlocks other than to curse at or about them, this is huge. Currently, Life Tap converts a fixed quantity of health into mana (e.g. 580 health lifetaps into 580 mana), ergo, warlocks have geared heavily for high hitpoints (+ stamina gear and enchants, donchaknow) and mana pools be damned, they just swap their health into mana and eat babies’ souls. Indeed, even their class armor reflects this fascination with stamina over intellect and mana regeneration — cuz what care they for regen, lifetap isn’t at the mercy of out-of-combat mana rules or potion cooldowns.

It WAS what made warlocks so very deadly, and, so very valuable to raid DPS.

Of course. If that nerf goes live. Not so much. At least for a while until the ‘locks can regear for intellect over stamina. ENJOY!!

It’s like a minigame within the game, just like bag space. Regear for this, regear for that, resist sets are nice too, plus carry all that around in your tiny backpacks of suck.

So I’ve been watching the warlock venom on the Test Realm forums as Blizzard has cycled through multiple adjustments to the nerf because the ‘locks, they be LIVID, and the other classes are enjoying the show, and really … you should not relish another class’ nerf. The Wheel of Nerfs: round and round she goes, where she’ll stop, nobody knows.

Witness: Forum thread – LOCKS DESERVE EVERY SINGLE NERF THEY GET by Naitsirhc, level 64 shadow priest, suspected mage alt, of the Eldre’Thalas realm.

Any class that can drain life and mana is insanely OP, and you guys know it. It was not your fault that this game mechanic continues to exist, but I think every single nerf is warranted and should be applied to BALANCE this crap. And yes I am talking about PvP, I can care less about PvE. I’m sorry to be blunt, but this has gone on for far too freakin long.

The accusation: Reply #2 by Thromgal, level 70 warlock of Kil’jaeden.

You can go ahead and post on your mage.

Which sums up that thread very nicely.

And speaking of a mass exodus, where have all the healers gone?? Long time passing. Long time ago.

That’s rhetorical, I know very well where the healers have gone — away.

I did some faux research on the Healer Exodus of my own WoW realm by reading through all the recruitment threads on the first page — these would be all the recruitment threads that have been /bumped in the last few days, i.e. active recruitment threads.

The Results of my ten-minute research project:

Alliance
10 total recruitment threads
8 seeking healers only, 1 seeking healers + DPS
1 seeking DPS only (lucky dogs)

Horde
5 total recruitment threads
1 seeking healers + DPS
4 seeking DPS only (also lucky)

Some interesting faux facts from my own guild:

Of our raid healing core, only 2 are pre-Burning Crusade healing mains — 1 paladin, 1 priest. A week ago, the count would have been 3 — 2 paladins + that one very dedicated priest, but the one paladin … you might remember him as our paladin man-whore … he left our guild last week.

Quick drama debriefing: Our paladin man-whore left because his latest imaginary game girlfriend abandoned him and started hanging with our other pre-BC paladin (also a man-whore as we discovered), which drove the first man-whore into another emo phase for a few weeks, then he decided “fuck this” and left. Probably to seek other imaginary game girlfriends, who knows. Anyways, this relationship with ManWhore02 and the aforementioned imaginary game girlfriend is really distracting because they are usually fighting, and she’s usually threatening to LEAVE THE SERVER and what do we care if she leaves, she’s not a healer, then ManWhore02 gets upset with the guildmates cuz goddamit we should care but I just want to /gkick the both of them and be done with it. And further, it’s this kind of shit which tempts me to call for a moratorium on guilding female players, my apologies to all the drama-averse female players out there, but can’t people keep their personal lives out of the game and just kill stuff? Crimony!

Anyhow. Except for those two pre-BC healers, the rest of the raid healing core are post-BC healers. I’m hoping they have at least a few months in them before they burn out too.

Ya, I have a lot of hope. I don’t have any resto shaman, but I have a whole lot of hope.

I love that thread because there’s a handful of hardcores dueling dozens of casuals — and isn’t that what the Hardcore vs Casual argument is really about? A numbers game, ultimately a profit equation, and in that system Casuals > Hardcore. You live, you learn.

So, hardcore player Altyera of the Dalaran realm, self-described as “… better at this game than you. Much, much, much better”, wrote:

Powerful rewards for people incapable of playing this game seriously? Fine.

Give me something for playing this game well. Give me something for investing three and a half years playing my chosen class to the fullest. Give me something for organizing twenty-five people every week into a well-oiled machine capable of flawlessly tackling complex encounters. Give my members something special for beating the game.

Give me a title for killing every boss in the game. Make my name sparkle and the ground glow at my feet.

Give me a 310% mount for killing Illidan. It’s no less an accomplishment than Gladiator.

Give me an entire array of legendary weapons dropping from Illidan, Archimonde and Kil’jaeden. What casual could complain that they’re not well-earned?

Give me and the top 500 guilds a private forum to converse directly with the developers.

Give me early access to private test realms, expedited character copies and a direct line to the developers while I’m testing content.

You’re giving an awful lot to casual players in this patch. Give me back as much as I put into this game. Great, fun stuff for casuals is awesome, and it’s one reason WoW is so popular. Give the top 1% some incentive to continue investing the time and effort necessary to stay at the top of this game.

Gear that is 3% better than a casual player’s and a couple fancy titles for doing things that no longer matter are far, far less than we deserve.

This is what I love about the Hardcore vs Casual debate as the Hardcores frequently argue: it’s not enough that Casuals get less, or later, than the Hardcores, they have to get much less, preferably much later.

Here’s some more:

Reply #60

The people who consider themselves casuals ruin the game for the people that play it with the purpose of trying to accomplish something they consider great. They spoil the rewards earned by people who put the time, effort, and thought into raiding.

HAHAHA. You casuals are RUINING the game for the people who accomplish GREAT things. Oh fercrissakes.

Reply #13

I have seen people with families and careers get to illidan and farm BT….nobody has an excuses anymore except lack of trying and just plain giving up or being a paraplegic, down-syndrome monkey. Why should they be entitled to free stuff for not trying when the people that actually try get exactly the same things? Its beyond silly…

Parapalegics don’t deserve epics either, I guess. Nice attitude, asshole.

Reply #26

Oh wait, I forgot that most casuals are god-awful at this game.

Pssst, so are most hardcores.

Reply #37

You just can’t talk to them Alty, they refuse, can’t, and never will understand anything about risk/reward in the game, or life.

He’s probably one of those gamers who are CEO of their own start-ups pulling down six figures while married to the super-model wife and raising six children. Even on my own WoW server, we have a lot of those. I assume they’re passing out WoW boxes with subscriptions to Fortune and The Wall Street Journal.

Reply #139

Raiders and hard-core pvper’s make-up the core and soul of this game. Kill that and kill the game. All you are doing is catering to make sh1t so damn easy my unborn child could clear every instance in the game within a week. I’m wondering when they will be giving away epics upon creating an account.

Hyperbole can be an effective argument tool. This would not be a good example of such.

Every EverQuest and Ultima Online player remembers a day when there was no choice like we have in WoW now. I didn’t play UO, but I did play EQ and there was no casual play — everything required a guild, and an able guild at that. (Ok, there was roleplaying and cyber, but we’re talking about gear and character advancement here, stud.) That wasn’t good.

Sure it was great killing Nagafen with 60 people, or getting your class epic (thanks to your guild, and possibly the entire server), but it would have been nice to have another option to get stuff. The stuff didn’t have to be the best, just better than the stuff we had. Choice would have been nice.

Today’s raiders do deserve better rewards, yes — they put in more time and deal with headaches that a solo player will never know — but we should not argue for a big gear gap. Never, never, never should we argue for a big gear gap.

One reason: recruitment.

There are two pools for raiding guilds to recruit from (yes, hardcore ones also): other guilds and new(er)-to-raiding players. If you’re a bottom-line type person, think of this as Good Gear and Shit Gear. If you’re delusional, you might think of it as Skilled Players vs Clueless Noobs.

If you’re pulling most of your new guildmates from other guilds, you’re recruiting guild hoppers, loot whiners, the “I have to log after that last wipe for real life stuff but really I’m tired of wiping and will rejoin you when this is on farm” opportunists, plus a few valuable guildmates along the way.

If you’re refreshing your ranks with new(er)-to-raiding characters, you may similarly be plagued. Players slow to learn, prone to log mid-raid, incapable of moving out of dangerous floor bombs, ignorant of class abilities and/or strengths and weaknesses, also guild hoppers and loot whiners, plus … a few valuable guildmates along the way … BUT your guild has to gear and attune them as well.

YAY!!! Back-gearing and back-attuning is fun!!

I assume all the hardcore guilds have the same goal: forward. Probably all guilds, hard and soft, have that same objective, in fact. Back-anything is not forward, by definition, and is to be avoided or mitigated at all costs.

For the TLDR crowd: Many hardcores overestimate their skill, contributions and the value of their game accomplishments.

Many casuals overestimate how interesting their real lives are.

Raid zones should have better rewards than solo content, otherwise why raid?

The gap between raid gear and solo/small group/small raid gear should not be so large as to require a long time commitment to get newer raiders ready for current guild targets.

Rogues should never be nerfed because we have so little in this world (of warcraft).

Well, my Vargoth image is jealous of this: the Alliance guild “vs Predator” of the Thunderlord server has taken their Vargoth on a tour of the world and they have the screenshots to prove it.

P.S. I really hope you have scripts off in your browser before you view that slideshow. Music alert.

The Raid-

You raid with these people. You work with these people. These people are closer than your family. You should worry.

The GM- He’s sacrificed his health, friends, and probably a couple of jobs to drag you through new content. When the guild isn’t performing, these decisions are in question. Prone to shooting sprees, forum flame wars, and the rapid advancement/gearing of whatever toon the guild “needs”. If you can keep your mouth shut, he’ll go emo and quit before you get gkicked. Still, you do like the guy. Or did. Before he went crazy. See drunks, below.

The GM’s Significant Other- Okay, so he was going to have to quit but he tricked his SO into playing. She loves it. She’s terrible. You’ll effectively 24 man every boss. Count on 4 constructs in the raid, every attempt. She plays a Belf.

The Raid Leader- When you stand in the flames, he dies a little bit inside.

The Heir Apparent- When the GM goes psycho, ninjas the bank, and gdisbands, you’re the guy the guild is gonna look to to to fix the mess. You see it coming. You can’t decide if ritual suicide or being the new gm would be more painful.

The Positive Officer- That was great. Just great. You know, only 5% of guilds have even made it to Supremus, and getting him down to 67% on the second attempt is hawt. See Stoners, below.

The Negative Officer- Jesus Christ why are there corpses under all these goddamn volcanoes? It’s Supremus for %@*@’s sake. GET OUT OF THE GODDAMN FLAME! See Drunks, below.

The Healing Officer- Has this job because, as the newest officer who plays a healer, he’s stuck with it.

The Hunter Class Lead- Will tell you that it does actually require skill and preparation to play a hunter well in the end game. Lies frequently.

Metermaid- He’s got meters running. Always. Asks for meter postage whenever he’s in the top 5, which is rare, as his focus on the meters is preventing him from seeing the volcano he’s pathing towards. Pulls aggro. Has yet to realize that 0 health returns 0 dps. If he’s healing, you might as well just put him on raid, he’s gonna heal them anyway.

Stratman- Has read every strategy on the entire internet for every boss. Unable to think critically. Knows where his talk key is. Hated by the officers. Likely to play a hunter or mage. If this is also Chick With Accent, below, guild will probably collapse.

The Gay Guy- Affects the gay accent for effect. Upgrade decisions tend to involve lengthy discussions about gear appearance. Learned to use the dressing room function before the v key.

The Stay At Home Mom- She’s around children all day and craves adult conversation. Babbles incessantly in vent, forgetting that adult conversation doesn’t usually begin with, “So I was talking to (insert name of four-year-old child) and he says …” Well liked, but frequently muted.

Mr. Mikeless- Has a microphone. Hears the conversation and directions. Once wiped the raid because he started talking and most folks alt-tabbed to see who the hell was speaking. May be your best player.

The Kid- So, you messed up on this guy’s interview and nobody noticed that he was 12. But, he can play. And if he gets a little bit excited when boobies are getting talked about? Hey, he’s young.

The Backbone- Plays a tank. Doesn’t have much to say. Made an error once in SSC, or so you heard. Will disconnect when Gorefiend is at 30% and keep aggro while offline for the rest of the fight. Has never said anything negative to the healers. Ever. GL with your progression without one of these. Hates the prima donnas.

The Other kid- Remember that accountant you interviewed for the fury warrior position? And how you wondered how he’d make time to raid during tax season? He couldn’t. His eleven year old daughter took over about that time. She’s been raiding since. Mages, that’s an eleven year-old girl owning you night after night.

The Hunter Who Doesn’t Do His Homework- Always good for insightful commentary and clever observation just after a wipe. “Holy Crap Man! I was just standing and shooting and this damn VOLCANO popped on me! When did they put in those volcanoes?”

The Prophet- Kept insisting that you were going to need a melee group for BT, despite the fact hat melee was dreadful for SSC/BT. Badgered the management until they broke. Plays a rogue. Shreds. Loved by the Most Devout.

The Most Devout- This is the guy who gets to play an off-spec in a big-boy raid. He’s the fury warrior or the enhance shammy. He cannot believe that some fate is letting him have this much fun that he’s afraid it will all come crashing down. Prays devoutly to his favorite diety that the guild won’t collapse because he’ll never have THIS much fun again. Ever.

The Drunks- The core of your guild. As raid progresses, their voices in vent are getting just ever so slightly slurred. You don’t notice because you’re trying to sound sober yourself. DPS output seems to scale positively with blood alcohol content.

The Stoners- Quietly wiping raids since the beta. They really, really, really hate having to move out of the fire. Two of them are dead under the volcanoes. They live in fear of the negative officer. They have their own channel. Try /join (insertguildname)stoners. You’ll see who’s in there. It’ll explain a lot. Still, if these guys don’t show, bosses don’t seem to actually die. They’re also having more fun that everyone else combined.

The Prima Donna- Requires special attention from management. Constantly whining. Plays some vital role. Might be a main tank, mage tank, or lock tank. The officers really hate this guy and as soon as they can find another tank with 24,000 buffed HP, he’s out. Not a stoner.

The Chick with the Accent- Is the accent fake? Nobody knows or cares. Future visits to Australia/Britian/New Zealand/Alabama are now planned by all single raid members.

The Healing Pallie- Hates healing and had to go holy to see endgame. If you raid with a boomkin, a feral druid, a fury warrior, or any non-resto shaman, you are not getting a 10 minute blessing. Forget it. He hates you. God help you if he has a raid-viable alt in one of those classes; you’re not even getting heals. Also, see Prima Donna.

The Departed Legend- You joined after he left. You suspect that he could not actually solo Doomwalker. But you’re not totally sure.

The Disgruntled Raider- Took an unannounced, extended vacation and now has to share his raid spot with the other 11 extra dps. Very angry about this situation. Doesn’t realize that ##@#*ing is making things worse. Officers pray for a gquit.

The Warlock Whisperer- Directionally challenged. Despite having run Karazhan 1.26 million times, will require a summon to Maiden’s room from the entrance. Has a “summon pls” macro. Strangely, is good at moving away from volcanoes. See (you guessed it) Stoners.

The New Guy- Begins most sentences with, “That’s not how we did it in my old guild on Korgath.” Likely to remain guilded for approximately one week. You wonder if he’ll be tellign his next guild, “In my old guild, we ran TOWARDS the volcanoes.

Note: I read a similar archetype post couple years ago, when I first started raiding. It altered the way I viewed raiding forever after and I’ve tended to think of my guildies along these terms since.

We had a “Chick with the Accent” in our guild recently. I’ll use the word charming because this is a family blog. But lemme tell ya, after a few battlegrounds and raids, it wasn’t so charming.

She left recently to follow her game boyfriend (who I suspect is married to another woman IRL but I never said anything because it’s frankly none of my business), they went to another guild because he decided he hated our guild.

That was cool though — those two were the types who screenshot every single game conversation to prove whatever secret agenda they had that day. Was really annoying to get their screenshots all the time in my email about how Soandso disrespected them or Whosit was mean to their friend.

Despite the (formerly) charming accent, habitual convo screenshotters mean one thing to me: DRAMA WHORES. They are to be avoided at all costs, and, for your own safety, do not send them any /tells.

The setup:

you’ve probably guessed it. im a horde warlock, and im looking to go to Zul’Aman with a raid group. My guild is too small to go with. I will respec affliction and dps if i get the chance to go with anyone. And if it matters im only going for one drop, Hex shrunken head. The rest i won’t roll on, i don’t care about the other drops. If i get the head i won’t leave the raid either because i got what i wanted, i’ll finish it out. Please send me a message in game if we could arrange something. Thank you

Zeromaz

ok i have resorted to paying for this shrunken head… give me a time and a price. send me a piece of mail in game, a message… whatever. im a pvp warlock and i have no way of getting this trinket myself, please help.

So … (I think) the guy gets an audition with a guild willing to take him into Zul’Aman and they invite him into their Ventrilo server.

Part I of the Vent recording
Part II of the Vent recording

(Both NSFW: language, plus, terrible music)

1. Holidays. Duh.
2. Traveling for the holidays.
3. Finished a major project at work. Ka-ching!
4. Traveling for work. Bleh.
5. Updated the blog software and ruined the site … on New Year’s Day while VERY hung over. That was fun.
6. Told 1/3 of our World of Warcraft guild membership to GTFO of our guild. We realized it was more efficient to have them type /gquit then go down the list and /gkick. Really saved a lot of time.
7. Explained on Vent that we really did mean it.
8. No. Seriously. GTFO.

Here’s the thing. Every goddamn year around Christmas time, raiding guilds go through this period where people are traveling or spending time with their families or both, cuz THAT’S WHAT NORMAL PEOPLE DO. So, of course, the raiding (read: the loot train) slows down or grinds to a halt, only to pick up again after the holidays have passed. And every goddamn year, there’s a group of players who begin to panic when the loot train isn’t chugging down the tracks. “Are we disbanding?” “Will we raid again?” “This guild is dead!!”

Fercrissakes, it’s two weeks out of the year and these losers can’t wait for people to get back to their computers.

So our officers told the losers not to panic, and, after the holidays, they’d see, everything would be back to normal.

Apparently, losers don’t have access to calendars, and in their world, the holidays are over December 26th. Therefore, they had been more than patient by waiting until January 1st to start issuing ultimatums like … replacing our long-serving officers and giving King Loser the guildleader rank. (Riiight.)

See #5 above. I was trying to put out a fire on Ye Olde Blog while alt-tabbed at the PVP lounge and those sonuvabitches are complaining because we’re not in Serpentshrine Cavern and goddammit, turn over that guildleader tag and give them admin rights to all the web resources and the Ventrilo server so they can get to it.

The officers said, “So go raid SSC, nothing stopping you.” And indeed, they were welcome to raid SSC, there was nothing stopping them.

Not good enough. They wanted the raid leader to stop playing his alt and lead the raid; they wanted me to stop screwing around at the PVP battlemasters and heal the raid on my priest alt; and pretty much everyone to stop what they’re doing for a good old-fashioned New Year’s Day raid in Serpentshrine Cavern.

It was one of those super-rare moments when everyone’s temper blows at once. In short, every single officer online issued a “GTFO” (or some variation thereof), and me, late to the party, added my GTFO on Ventrilo … y’know, for the illiterate in the audience.

Those that GTFO are now on their third post-Foton guild.

9. Remember that one chick in my guild who plays the same class as me, and, she and her imaginary guild boyfriend always hassled me — more accurately, passively aggressively hassled me — about rolling/bidding on any loot ever that she might want? They left. Server transferred to another server where her dude had a real life friend in a Black Temple guild. He’s the one guy in all of gaming who has a worse personality online than out in the world. We were all (secretly) glad to see them leave.

Guess that didn’t work out though because they’re unguilded now. BIG surprise.

10. I PVP’d ALOT. Mostly Eye of the Storm. As you might recall, Alterac Valley is dead on my battlegroup, but I tried AV out a few times to see if it was still dead. Take a look.

This one was outrageous too:

A screenshot demonstrating the sieve-like qualities of the Stormpike graveyard:

That was actually a fun Alterac Valley. No wait. It wasn’t. Made a good screenshot tho.

11. Leveled up a couple of alts, mostly for PVP fun, and took them to Alterac Valley to see if the other brackets are as stupid as the level 70 AV. Surprisingly, no. And I’ll say here, if your battlegroup’s Horde aren’t winning every single AV except late at night when they all fall asleep at the keyboard, your Horde aren’t doing it right.
12. Chuckled at the AV changes coming in Patch 2.4. Whatever. It’s much too late. Patch 2.3 was released 11/13/2007 so that’s 3 months (and counting) of Horde 3 medals plus 500-ish+ bonus honor per versus Alliance one medal + 0-ish bonus honor per. On my battlegroup at least … and almost all the others now. No way that gear gap will have a lasting effect. No way.
13. Shelved my level 70 priest alt, probably for good, but at least until Wrath of the Lich King’s gear reset. And I mean SHELVED. Emptied the mailbox, burned the transmute timers, shipped out the gold and primo mats to my rogue, and wrote a short retirement post for the guild boards. And I’ll tell you the reasons why.

As healers burnt out, we were relying more and more on my priest to pick up the healing slack, which was the purpose of my priest alt, yes, but I figure I’ve put in my time and we were never going to stop leaning on my priest until I called a halt to it. So I did.

But also, I confirmed in my own mind what I suspected when The Burning Crusade went live: priests are not the foundation on which to build a guild’s healing strategy anymore. I’ll go so far as to say that guilds should bring ONE priest on raids for the buffs, shadow-spec preferred, and round out the raid healing with paladins primarily + druids and shaman.

You might disagree, many in my guild do.

(And NO! I do NOT want Blizzard to nerf paladins … or druids or shaman. Toss the priests a bone and stop yammering about Lightwell, you twits.)

14. Attracted another anonymous game stalker who hates me and my guild and can’t stop posting about his hate on the official World of Warcraft boards from the safety of his level-nothing posting alt.

I promise you this: I am going to find out who that motherfucker is and then I’m going to call him on his bullshit.

Meanwhile, his drama posts are becoming ever more shrill since we (the royal guild we) all refuse to take his bait.

15. Did some thinking about server transferring. My realm is low/medium population, guild recruitment is a bitch lemmetellya, and as you know, my battlegroup is awful. It’s not just the AV thing, our Alliance has some truly terrible PVPers — disheartened PVPers, always-AFK PVPers, and stupid, very very stoopid PVPers, hunters who never trap, warlocks who never fear, paladins who think they have Hammers of Glory, rogues who can’t afford poisons, the list is endless. Sad.

On the other hand, it’s a great realm for leveling alts or farming mat(erial)s.

Still thinking on that, but if you have a realm recommendation, by all means, speak up.

16. STILL haven’t received a Warhammer Online beta invite. Those bastards.
17. Holy crap, that was a lot of spam email, phishing and keyloggers!
18. Realized that procrastinating blogly administrative chores for a month isn’t such a great idea. I mean, why can’t the internet tend to itself for a few weeks? I don’t know. It just won’t.
19. Our guild paladin man-whore MADE us guild invite his latest game love interest. She promptly dumped him and took up with another paladin in the guild. How long until this blows up in our face? (Y’know, more so than it already has.) I’m going to guess two weeks, tops.

So we all have THAT to look forward to.

and 20. I discovered a place on the public World of Warcraft forums where no man, woman or child should dare tread: the battlegroup forums.

If you’ve never been, it’s worse than you can imagine, and if you have been, it’s worse than you remember.

I’ve been trying to recover ever since my gruesome discovery. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Dear *Former Member*,

You’re a great player and any guild would be lucky to have you.

Unfortunately, there was a ruckus on the public realm forums (which you initiated?). Insult to injury, the ruckus was about your application to another guild. Something about they denied your application … and also your app was a complete surprise to us?

You see our point.

While we do appreciate functional alcoholism (and who among us hasn’t applied to a rival guild while drunk? — we all have!), we’d like to move on.

Best Wishes Always,

*Foton’s Guild*

Feel free to use this template for your own guild. You wouldn’t think you’d need this kind of administration for gaming guilds, but you really do.