Cataclysmic addiction

As you may have guessed, I’ve been playing Cataclysm.
At frenzied, massive-addiction levels. I took a week off work when it launched, spent the holidays with it and the giant cracked gamer callous on my thumb is well on its way to healing. My priest is all decked out with the best gear I could get for her outside of raids.

Since I haven’t been raiding.

And my mage is starting to gear up, and my goblin banker is safely dwelling in the bank, and my warrior and DK have gone up a few levels just from farming. Haven’t touched my allies yet. Created a new goblin on Zangarmarsh and haven’t played it. Ditto for the cow pally. But my second druid (/eyeroll) is level 42. I wanted a troll one, plus I wanted to check out the new quests from a noob POV.

But let’s talk more about this “haven’t been raiding.”

My guild is officially Not Doing 25s, which brings great sadness to my heart. I haven’t been able to get into the 10s either, which is run by the Clique I’m Not In (“CINI”). Much of the CINI plays from Brazil and prefer to start raiding about the time I’m leaving work. There isn’t really a Clique I’m In, unless you want to count the major raid addicts. I could build one, but that’s a level of involvement I’d rather not have, so I try to settle for being reliable, with a high baseline. I’m nice to atypical people, and I’ve been known to deny heals to asshats while laughing at their death throes.

True story: I got a random dungeon group and wound up with a pretty decent pally tank (I still feel guilty about him) and Larry, Curley and Moe for DPS. LC&M immediately share that they’re in the same room and let loose with some jokes about gay people and AIDS. We do a few fights with me healing the tank only, as I explain that I wouldn’t want my San Franciscan heals to contaminate them. Finally I let them all die and advised them that perhaps they could get Rush Limbaugh to heal, and dropped group, thereby wasting a good hour of their time.

I was much nicer before Cataclysm. When I ran into rude jerks I somehow mentally categorized most of them as being some kind of subspecies of mob programmed to talk smack, and mostly I ran around with guildies. Cata, however, has made everybody mean.

This is because the dungeons are hard again. Not even as hard as they were when Wrath came out – these suckers are Burning Crusades difficult, with insidious mechanics and a wide array of interesting floor patterns to not stand in.
From that standpoint, I am in gamer Valhalla. Finally! A videogamelike experience, as opposed to a ritualistic performance!

But not everybody shares my opinion, apparently. The forums, and WoW Insider, and trade chat, are all full of rage as people discover the difficulty of finding other people who know what they’re doing. The bads are raging because nobody wants to be their friend any more. The goods are raging because they keep getting stuck in random instances with bads. DPS have to wait 40 minutes or so for their queue.
Healers, however, are the new tanks. We get queues right away. We also get the usual amount of blame and unfairness like getting votekicked because the mages couldn’t stay out of the tornadoes, or because the group’s guildie couldn’t heal that particular boss but wants in for the last one. This leads to a certain amount of arrogance, like my above anecdote illustrates.

I get humbled frequently though too, and random instances involve bouncing from situations where people are treating you with extreme deference to places where idiots are screaming at you over their mistakes. This kind of frequent wide polarity shift is good for me at some level, even if sometimes annoying.

So I have been surfing the random seas of randomness in the random group finder, because I am not in the CINI and I kept getting stuck in guild runs with persistent annoying types who want to be carried to greatness right now, or after they go afk for 20 minutes to smoke a cigarette, and who then pitch tantrums worse than any pug whenever things go wrong due for reasons they don’t understand. So I take my chances with strangers.

Fortunately I ran across some pretty cool strangers. Other inhabitants of videogame Valhalla, who were getting off on the fact there were no Official Stand Here And Press Buttons In The Following Order type strategies, and we actually have to think on our feet.

And a few raging bads too, of course. And mixed bags, like the guy who queued as a tank but is no way geared for it and is wasting everyone's time, yet still is polite and reasonable. Or the good player that rages at everyone for not being his idea of good, and gets into extended arguments with DPS. As for people with abrasive personalities, life’s too short to spend time with them, especially if they’re dps.

And because the learning curve has shifted drastically . . . we’re no longer raiding in 25 groups. Withdrawal from raiding definitely left me edgier and sharper tongued and more likely to respond with a “see here now, you fool!” rather than a “whoa, you’re agro, that’s weird, I’ll just wander away.”

How’s the game? Gorgeous. They put a lot of work into the expansion, which revamps most of the world, and allows you to fly over it. The quests have been overhauled and are nowhere near as grindy. I actually have an issue with the easy quests. Nothing remotely challenges you. My old practice of doing the hardest quests to level faster is gone, these days you have to stay on the little car with rails, just like Disneyland. Everything is colorful and entertaining. Some of the quests – I’m looking at you, Welcome To The Machine -- are hilarious. There are cut scenes all over the place, and shiny new bling to hoard and overcharge for.

And then when you get through with those the group stuff starts, and it’s tough, and requires coordination, and thorough knowledge of all the pretty icons in your spellbook other than the basic “hit stuff” command you’ve been spamming for the past 85 levels.

Tomorrow, raiding resumes. I guess I’ll be doing a 10, with the B team. We’ll see how that goes.