I’ve been slacking in WoW-ness lately, mostly because Disgaea 4 and Pokemon Mystery Dungeon have been eating my soul. (Omnomnomnom) Yes, this part is relevant because of what I’m about to bust out in terms of awful mental images:

So I’m trolling Wikipedia to find a full Disgaea 4 cast list (specifically, I wanted to find out who got tapped for Zetta this time, even though nobody will ever compare to the awesomeness that is Crispin Freeman in Badass Freaking Overdrive mode). Eventually it turns into scanning voice actor entries and I find this little blip at the bottom of Troy Baker’s list:

“World of Warcraft: Tirion Fordring”

….

WHAT.

I hated Tirion! Emo angsty uncool old dude who decided to stuff his face with Wheaties before ICC (seriously, dude got HUGE between the lead-in quests and ICC) and… oh… right, I guess he did sound a little like Valvatorez. BUT NOW I CAN’T UNHEAR IT. :( It’s either I’m going to imagine Tirion as a fallen vampire who has a sardine fetish, or a fallen vampire who won’t stop running his mouth about the Light.

…though, I will admit that the scenes for the Lich King fight were pretty badass. Still! HEAD-BREAKING.

Then again, I should be more WTF about how the Lich King = Gordon, DEFENDER OF EARTH… and Arthas is Fenrich, and Jaina is Raspberyl. And I swear that one boss in Old Kingdom has Laharl-voice (well, leaning more towards Rita Repulsa than Laharl, but…) Talk about your bizarre Disgaea connections. :P

O hi. I almost forgot I have this, but, uh, yeah.

Last month, I was levelling my cow priest via random dungeon finder, and idling in Org while waiting to get dropped into another group. I had Gurren Lagann running on my secondary monitor as background noise, and I tabbed over to check TweetDeck when all of a sudden everything froze up and closed, and I see something that resembled but clearly WASN’T Windows Security Center throwing a shitfit over “blahblahblah.sys can’t open, please click to activate Privacy Protection” while running some sort of scanner. What the hell was this and why wasn’t AVG crapping its pants, too? One groin-kick reboot (my term for pressing the tiny restart button on Blastoise’s case) later… and, yeah, still in “lolololol Privacy Protection” panic mode.

Oh crap. Blastoise just got torpedoed. Nothing I could do but to shut him off.

I could have just dug up his Windows 7 disc and did an OS reinstall… but why? Since August, when I cashed out my crappily-performing CD from the credit union (which I NEVER should have let my stepfather talk me into because the interest rate sucks ass), I was already planning out Blastoise’s rebuild. Dood was already past his 4th year and that’s historically been as long as I could stretch a machine between rebuilds, but I was hoping to do the rebuild after Black Friday so I could take advantage of the sales. The timing of Blastoise getting torpedoed sucks, but I opted to wait until Black Friday rather than order his parts on the spot. It would leave me without a true gaming rig for a week or so, but I was sure I could repurpose Yggdrasil (my media server) as a temporary gaming rig for any raids that would go down until I could get Blastoise’s new body rebuilt.

That worked… to moderate success. There was a Firelands raid for Kopii Yoshi and I logged in from Yggdrasil. Imagine, if you will, FF4’s FuSoYa borrowing Kain’s helmet and spear, because that’s pretty much what I had to do— transfer over Blastoise’s keyboard/mouse (because nobody in their right mind would ever think of using a Logitech diNovo Mini for gaming) and headset, and slap Vent on the old man. It was awkward to cram the huge keyboard and mouse on this weeny little rolling table (which is barely big enough to hold my MacBook, mouse and a small drink) and Yggdrasil had what I would call “senior moments” in which his framerate would go to crap for a few minutes. But at least he could hold things together.

As Blastoise’s new parts came in… well, there was something I’d tossed in for Dinah the MacBook— a RAM upgrade. As part of the Black Friday sales, some types of RAM were given very generous price drops, and Dinah fell into that pile. It costs more to order pizza than to boost her to 4 GB. XD And, well… that upgrade is invisible in terms of effects on normal operations (firefox and such) but it was a HUGE shot in the arm for her WoW installation. Before, it was barely usable: I could, at best, use the auction house and mailbox and MAYBE wade through dailies, but forget about even 5-mans.

BUT… after I shoved the 4GB into Dinah? Holy cow crap. 5-mans? No problem! 10-mans are fine too! And as I would find out tonight, even 25-mans in Raid Finder didn’t kill my framerate much, even with spells flying everywhere. MacBooks kick ass! This really made me glad that I decided to go this route last year when I replaced Dinah the aging Windows laptop. :D Although Blastoise will no doubt be taking back his role as my main gaming rig, I now know that Dinah can easily step up in the future if I should be away from home but need to log into WoW anyhow.

Now all of Blastoise’s parts are here… it’s just that I keep getting interrupted or that I oversleep… or both, really. And then I end up running out of daylight, and I would really prefer not to be staying up to babysit installations. Tomorrow (Saturday) I don’t have anything booked, so I should be able to unbox, build and boot Blastoise all in one go.

—-

RAID FINDER. I was skeptical about this, but… well, having waded through a bunch of PuG 25-man ICC groups on Draenor, how bad could it really be? And this run was going to be dominated by Lazy Peons anyway. It went very, very smoothly, and gave me flashbacks of Pikmin. XD

Speaking of Draenor… I need to yank my brother and boss off Skyrim so we can run this stuff. I also need to reverse-copy my talent build and chants from Kopii Yoshi onto normal Yoshi. :P

I’ve not played around with transmogging and void storage yet, though… Kopii Yoshi doesn’t have much old tier gear, but normal Yoshi does… but I don’t really care to transmog either of them. Rather, I’d much prefer to transmog Phil and Kopii Phil when the latter is ready. BC-era priest tier sets look badass!

Because, you know, I’ve always associated /oom with dyslexic cows. Plus /moo is just a hilarious emote. (Doubly so if you pop it as a Tauren Death Knight since it uses the DK voice filter!)

Ahem.

Khadgar is now my “Kopii” server, since now I’ve rolled up Kopii Phil (or, properly, “Kophilionel”) as a Tauren Priest. As you can guess, he’s a bovine clone of old man (human) Phil from Draenor server, meaning lolholy and, uh… yeah, questing would kinda be a drawn-out, not-so-fun experience. So, into LFD for me.

“But Yoshi,” you say, “you HATE LFD! All those stupid people and boo jackasses that make things miserable, and now you’re going to use it?”

Fortunately, Khadgar (and the battlegroup it’s in) happens to be populated by mostly-harmless doods as opposed to the troll-ridden Draenor, so it’s not so painful to throw Kopii Phil into the fray. Since he’s a clone of Phil, and healing is (mostly) second nature to me now, I get to be a big fuzzy moo-cow that spams Renew and PW:Shield on the tank (and the occasional mage or rogue who rips aggro).

It’s not perfect, though… healers, we all deal with a particular flavor of boo jackassery: the tank on Energizer batteries! The one who keeps going and going and going… the one who charges in before you get to even sit down and chug your level-appropriate beverage (or nom on mana munchies if you’ve looted a mage’s cookie table), then bitches when you go OOM trying to heal and shield his impatient ass. Unless one’s rolling a Paladin (and even then…), we healers just can’t vomit HP out of thin air. Would it really kill you to wait not even 1 minute, but 30 seconds for us to take a swig before you go running into that mob?

(apparently so, because HERPA DERP, EXP AND VALOR POINTS, GO GO GO, NOT HEALING FAST ENOUGH OMG *PUNT*)

Anywho… Taurens! I love them. Well, I’ve always had a thing for cows (and I blame Harvest Moon almost entirely for that). When it came time to roll Kopii Phil, it was either go Blood Elf or Tauren… and Blood Elves were kinda lacking in the “old guy” options as far as hair styles go. Tauren dudes are like human dudes in that they have an adorably-awkward way of running, since they’re huge (seriously, even orcs are more graceful), and this fits Phil to a T, so his Horde self gets to be a lovably-dorky cow. :D (I’d thought of giving him a Resurrection macro in which he says “I’d give you milk, but I’m a dude” but that’s opening things up for abuse way too easily.)

I’ve got a couple Taurens on Draenor, too (the sisters Mauriska and Auriska) and they’re getting warp piped to Khadgar as soon as I reload my bank account… which should be this Monday, provided neither the credit union nor Wells Fargo gives me any crap. I’ve been putting off the transfer because of LOL CALIFORNIA and its stupid hot weather. Going out in 102+F = omg no, I pretty much wilt in anything above 90, but the widget on Blastoise says it’s going to be 94F on Monday and that’s as good as it’ll probably get for now, so I’ll just have to suck it up.

On Khadgar server, a Kopii Yoshi wanders in the Bastion of Twilight. Two successful runs thus far— three if last week’s raid hadn’t been cancelled, boo— and this time she got a minor upgrade to her offhand (Book of Binding Will). Still need a new hat like crazy, and the shoulders could stand an upgrade as well, to fix my bothersome low ilvl. :P

I started to doze off shortly before my raid group reached Cho’gall, though… and while this group normally does BoT and BWD back to back, that was not the case this time. In this case, this was probably a good thing, ahaha. Dood, I managed to stay normal-coherent enough to make it through the last boss fight without botching anything, so I can call that a win, I guess. (Bad enough I’m “Yoshi the Narcoleptic” on Draenor… I’ll not have that title follow me to Khadgar >_>)

Also: RealID grouping for the Dungeon Finder widget is going to remain free. Yessss. Now… I just need more friends who consistently play Alliance, because like hell am I throwing Yoshi (or Phil… or anyone else) in alone for LFD, especially for ZA/ZG groups. Not with how Draenor (well, the Cyclone battlegroup as a whole) tends to breed impatient boo jackasses that go and clog up the queues with their jerkface nonsense. :| I should bug Pigeon and others about dragging me with…

Derp. With boss gone for the foreseeable future, and my brother being just as flaky, I’ve been alt-ing it up as Kopii Yoshi on Khadgar server. Nice guild is niiiiiice. She’s already raid-viable, I just need to get her foot in the door.

…and wow, has it really been 8 months since I last did current-content raiding? Still kinda miffed I could never get Kingslayer. Maybe when boss and bro and others wander back we should try to 5-man ICC. (ahahahahaha)

But yeah, in the meantime I stick my finger into the Horde pool. Once I reload my magic coin block I’ll probably punt my Tauren twins (Mauriska the DK and Auriska the druid) over to Khadgar too, since it doesn’t look like bro plans to roll any Horde alts on Draenor. :|

Horde quests are pretty damn hilarious. So many instances of Grand Theft Everything. (ESPECIALLY when Goblins are involved.) Alliance is good if you like lore and drama, but if you want to laugh? You know where to go. :)

Summer is boo right now. I have this awful mystery bug that has given me a cough, the headache from hell and has further dropped my stamina. Oh, what I would give for a RL “Cure Disease” power right now… especially because I need to get to the credit union to break out a crappy CD that I stupidly let Evil Stepfather talk me into. (“They don’t have a website… it’s just some tiny building with a couple doods in the back, this makes me uncomfortable for some reason.” “Oh, they’re too good for websites!” Way to make phone-phobic me feel a LOT better, boo jackass.)

Ahem…

The other reason summer sucks? Everyone decides to just bail. Boss has vanished yet again without explanation, and bro doesn’t log in as much because it gets too hot where his computer is. The latter is forgivable (well, to a point… it’s EASILY fixed by coming over and taking one of our portable air purifier-what-zits, which has the added benefit of making the immediate area EXTREMELY COLD), but boss’s frequent disappearances is starting to bug me on an administrative level. He and a couple other guildies are of the mindset that they don’t need to monitor their account status to stay aware of when their game time is about to expire… which is fine, except boss is the freaking guild master, and if he’s going to do that and disappear for long blocks of time without telling anyone, he should at least put measures in place to make sure at least one other person has nearly-full access to the gbank and guild admin so we won’t be entirely screwed. (Of course, this also assumes my brother stops acting like a skinflint dumbface and either gets a freaking Authenticator or lets me buy him one so boss will give all his alts their rank back.) Can you tell I really have a thing against irresponsible people who don’t plan ahead? Especially those in positions of leadership?

Maybe I should be a bit more forceful in asking for promotion… like that will work. Boss will just “Lulz” and go about his business. -_-;

So, in the meantime, and mostly because I got sick of dealing with jerkasses in LFD ZA/ZG groups (good lord I’ve never seen people get so pissy, not even in raids!) I wandered over to my Blood Elf alt on Khadgar, Koyoshial! (Or, as her “true name” would be, Kopii Yoshi.) I’m finding that LFD groups over there are… actually nice people! Maybe it’s just luck? On top of that, the guild she’s in (Lazy Peons) is awesome; a couple doods who duo lowbie raids for lulz and profits have been carting me along for the past couple days and also running Northrend instances. :D She dinged 80 yesterday, so it’s just a matter of slogging it up to 85 and loading up on gear so I can finally make myself useful. :P

Power Torrent and Landslide, like other weapon enchants, put an aura of sorts on your weapons. For Power Torrent, it’s rather glowy and fiery and, to an extent, resembles the flaming aura on the Cataclysm logo. Landslide, as you can guess, looks like rocks and dirt breaking off. Makes sense, right?

Now, keep that in mind when you get on your flying mount and put on auto-run.

….

YEEEEAH. See what I did there?

It’s a little offputting (especially after you just ate), but after mentioning this in guild chat, one of our infrequent guildies pitched an idea for a new daily: one could use gryphon poop as fertilizer for that plot of farmland in northern Stormwind. You know, the one everyone loots for that one cooking daily where you get sent to get pumpkins for pancakes? (side note: I am sorely tempted to try pumpkin pancakes… I think IHOP serves those in late fall)

Alternatively, there’s always Goldshire, where lots of lowbies and PVP pranksters are likely to congregate. Just saying.

Asking to play with decent or at least not-douchebaggy doods in WoW is like asking for fire to not be hot, I realize, but good grief people can be such jerks over the smallest things.

I’m bumming around as Phil to get him gear so that old man, too, can go raid. Unfortunately, with Boss once again out of the picture and bro often going AFK to watch TV (I swear, I am this close to getting him a Slingbox and one of those MIMO monitors so he doesn’t have to go AFK or leave the TV on and turn the volume up hella loud), I’m left having to use LFD, and 9 times out of 10 it ends up with a little more of my soul withering away because people are so mean.

“Cry moar,” right? Maybe. I’ve finally ditched all of Phil’s Bloodthirsty gear (that would otherwise be useful except for the PVP stats), and I’ve respecced and reforged to pile on as much spirit as possible and use the right flasks/food buffs so he’s not having to chug after every group… and I’d like to think I know how to play a Holy Priest, on top of all that.

Now, I’m not like Boss in that I have a slightly higher tolerance for stupid tanks (or at least, tolerant enough where it’s a better use of my time to try to heal through boneheaded moments rather than bitch about bad tanks in guild chat), but even I have limits. I do what I can, but when I go OOM because Mr. Dumbhead Tank can’t be bothered to let me drink before charging into that next mob, then gets all pissed off because despite all good efforts I can’t heal him in time… yeah, it kinda stings a bit. :( But I’d rather not pick a fight with someone I’m not likely to see again, so in the worst cases I end up quietly dropping from the group. Maybe in a way I’m also denying Mr. Dumbhead Tank the pleasure of ragekicking me, so that offsets things a bit.

I could just pimp myself out locally… but that would mean using Trade/LFG Chat which, of course, is just… no. It seems all the potential nice people are all guilded up and out of sight. It’s kind of sad, really. Even though Shattered Knights is so small that it has issues filling 5-man runs, I can’t think about dropping it just so I can find not-jerks that I can consistently group with… you must remember that WoW is often the only way I can talk to bro because he’s a dork who doesn’t answer his phone or emails. It’s also too bad that boss and bro hate people so much that they won’t consider recruiting. I was lucky to even convince Pigeon to roll alts on Draenor.

Worst case… well, this is why I have Koyoshial on Khadgar (Blood Elf Mage, basically Kopii Yoshi). Still too small to raid (lv 75) but she IS in a raiding guild and so far the doods there have been pretty nice. Ah…

On the upside: Phil got a hat and staff upgrade. Granted, the staff is a caster DPS weapon but 1) this is why we have Reforging and 2) it should otherwise hold him until I either get the Heroic Soul Releaser or something from ZA/ZG. :P

Presuming, of course, that I get a group that doesn’t either fall apart or ragekick me first. People are wonderful like that, aren’t they?

Yoshi had DPS issues for awhile. She had switched to LOLFIRE for a bit at the behest of boss and bro, but after patch 4.2 her DPS, uh, went right into the crapper. I was getting kicked from LFD because I couldn’t quite break 6k. Oof. :(

So I’m all “screw it, I’m going back to Arcane,” because that’s a lot easier to pound out (blast x5, missiles almost always procs, then barrage, rinse and repeat) and now I’m doing at least 11k, so all those stupid people in PUGs can shut their pie holes about my DPS. :P

Better still? Check that screencap: hell yeah, Legacy of Arlokk w/ Power Torrent chant. >:D Yoshi is almost ready to jump back into the raid pool (or at least join on Firelands trash runs for recipes *Homer drool*) and just needs two more iLvls… and chances are that will come from a foot upgrade. I think.

Take it from someone who’s been described as totally lacking in any kind of evil— when you roll with Shattered Knights, you either need a thick skin or you’d better be able to grow one quickly. Boss and bro don’t mince words, not even for me. Whenever I roll out another character for guild runs— and bless them for taking the time to even do what they do— they pretty much devote at least an evening to, for lack of a better word, “reconstruction.”

Unless you’ve played that same class before, how you play in getting to 85 and how you play after that… two completely different things. We like to call the pre-85 trip “survival mode” in which you craft your playstyle along the way. It gets you from A to B, and since you’re alone for much of it, it’s okay if it’s not the most DPS-efficient or what-have-you since you’re going at your own pace and nobody’s there to call you out.

And then when those two get a hold of you… oh man. First it’s respec time (and if my brother’s running the operation, he tends to additionally send you to ElitistJerks to read the specifics); if Boss isn’t on hand, and unless he says otherwise, it’s allowed and expected to copypasta a relevant build off one of his characters in the name of saving time. Your glyphs and gems are redone as needed, and sometimes equipment if we have the materials available, and then you’re brought over to the dummies for a new rotation, and finally you get carted into instances for live field testing. Be a quiet little sponge and do what they tell you— if you slack off, they’ll know and call you on it right away— and you should get through the night with much of your dignity intact.

It’s not that they mean to be douchebags, because they’re not (at least, not so much in the “we hate everyone, especially you” type). It’s just how they are. It’s a dude thing.

Yoshi and Hynderia got put through “SK School,” and they do perform much better because of it. And Phil is probably next— we’ve some fresh 85s popping up and they’re all DPS classes, and we can’t have my brother healing all the time, so I may as well throw old man back into the pool.