How Much Raiding Is Too Much Raiding?

So! My priest/main is about as geared as she’s going to get. She slew the king and got her Kingslayer title, she’s sporting four pieces of T10 with-the-regular-25-token-but-not-the-heroic-token, items below item level 264 do not touch her virtual skin, gearscore is 6100+. She’s currently bogged in heroic achievements, which require 24 other people to show up on time and be competent, which has been confounded by guild reorganization plus the summer lull.

My mage is also mostly geared (5800+), but since the alt runs haven’t gone for the past couple weeks (see guild reorganization + summer lull), she doesn’t do a lot these days. Maybe run that daily with the polar bear mount, or go farm some frozen lotuses and fish. And my death knight is also mostly geared (5400+), I could grind out 50 more emblems and upgrade something, maybe, if I felt like it. I’ve been working on my warrior, hunter and druid (all 5200+). The warrior steadfastly tanks dailies so that she can be geared in case anybody ever lets me tank ICC or something, which probably won’t happen soon, sigh. The hunter is slightly gimped by her poor dps output – dps runs on gear to a far greater extent than healers and tanks. And the druid has discovered that if I log her in on Monday nights 6 to 8 hours before server reset, I can often find an ICC 25 pug desperate enough to let her in. I’ve gotten five pieces of 264 gear doing that the last couple weeks.

My “sort of goal” (because it depends to a large part on luck and other people) is to have six kingslayers by the time the expansion launches. One down, five to go.

Last night, I found myself in an interesting situation. My priest was on raid standby for the ICC hard mode stuff, and one of the reasons I have two accounts is so that I can park one toon somewhere while my brain is alt-tabbed on the other side, having adventures and the like. Keep your ADHD comments to yourself. One thing I love about MMOs is that I can let my atypical brain run free without having typical brains lecture me about being more like them. So anyway, the healer is sitting around outside ICC in case the raid needs her, and my brain is over on my hunter. Alliance side, same server. I had just gotten the hunter into a guild-run VOA when I heard my name mentioned over vent as my guildies decided they needed my presence on Sindragosa.

So I did what any normal person would do in that situation . . . well no, I did what I would do in that situation. Throw ‘em both into windowed mode, drag one window onto monitor 2 to obscure the vent window (most of the time I only use monitor 2 to see whose voice is annoying me at the moment). Hunter runs forward (while healer surreptitiously throws /follow on another player). Healer furiously spams all-purpose healing macros (bound to the S and D keys), click hunter window, furiously spam dps macros (F5 and F7 – my all purpose dps keys). Before long I had this rhythm going, alt tab, F5/F7, alt tab, S/D, repeat.

Eventually the hunter died trying to shoot frozen orbs, leaving me able to focus on the healer for about a minute and a half, not that it helped. End result: the healer’s raid wiped (not my fault though, and I did a few last-second saves) and the hunter’s raid triumphed (although we got yelled at for poor DPS and dying), and I scored some T10 gloves and offered up a bogus “gee, I’m really lagging tonight” excuse. Then the hunter ported out to the crowded city of Dalaran, which was enough to make my poor computer lock up and crash me out of one account entirely.

Of course, I can’t tell my guildies on either server my 2boxing different raids story, because they’ll get mad at me for risking their virtual lives. And in fact I probably shouldn’t tell any WoW players at all, because my raid credibility would plummet if this got out. Although it’s debatable whether it would plummet faster than the failed Naxx 10 weekly I did on my tank a little earlier, where I taunted the wrong thing and we died and I logged out of shame. I could easily blame “bad/missing instructions” but I hate being incompetent, whether or not there’s an excuse. And while I wasn’t totally incompetent while 2box raiding, I’d be lying if I claimed it didn’t compromise my performance. And since I pulled this off without being detected, drawing attention to it would defeat my purposes.

I got a really shiny adrenalin rush out of the whole experience though. Maybe this means I’m hardcore. Maybe this means I’ve beat WoW and it’s time for a new game. Maybe the expansion and/or Old Republic online will be out soon.

Anyway, if you were patient enough to make it this far – don’t tell my guildies. And don’t worry, I won’t pull this trick on raids with you . . . probably. Unless you expect me to stand around staring at the screen waiting for extended periods of time. I have a hard time with that. And also, here’s an interview with Cory Doctorow about For The Win, which I recently praised. Enjoy!