Hanging up my Tank Boots, and Christmas

Tomorrow is Christmas Eve. I have to admit, I'm not really feeling it this year, the Christmas Spirit, that is. Ultimately, I'm down because instead of enjoying Christmas day with my family, I will be in the office, slaving away. No Christmas dinner, I'm in until 7:30. No early morning present opening, we, children are older now and the presents will begin opening at roughly the time I clock in. My parents have offered to drive me in, if I still want to spend the night at their place, which I have traditionally done, but it makes no sense, to the practical side of me at least, to have them wake up early to drive me in.

The whole situation just makes me seethe. I'm so angry, so angry that because I am my mothers daughter, all I have wanted to do, this whole month, is cry.

Because it's not fair.

Because there is nothing I can do about it.

I have never, in my life wanted to quit a job more than I do now. The truth is, I can't. Voluntary unemployment with no real prospects would be irresponsible and something that we couldn't handle financially at the moment. It's something that I can't do, but I want to.

I cannot see myself being anywhere near functional on Christmas morning when I go into work.

I hate to be such a downer this close to Christmas, but pretending that everything is awesome felt contrived and dishonest. I'm not willing to lie.

I know, that I'm being a huge baby about this. Believe me, I do. I know, that it could be worse, and that I am infinitely lucky to have a family that I wish so desperately to spend the holiday with and traditions that I hold so dear that it breaks my heart to let go of this year. Cy has told me more than once that I need to grow up and stop complaining about it. He doesn't have to work on Christmas. His advice just makes it worse.

Would you believe this was originally supposed to segue into a chat about WoW, and my Death Knight? Really, it wasn't meant to be an emotional over share, and I never intended to become so personal on here.

Back to that Death Knight post eh?

I had originally wanted to talk a little about what I've been doing this past week, since my school vacation started. The answer to that is levelling my death knight, like a fiend. Since I'm not raiding yet, and probably won't be, realistically, until the summer when I'll have time to seek out and devote to a raid team, levelling has provided me something to do in WoW since I'm not really feeling my dailies lately.

Really though, in discussing my levelling, I really wanted to talk about the quality of the dungeon groups I've been getting, or rather, the lack thereof.

It seems to me, that if your group has an asshat in it they can smell your insecurities. I've been a healer for 6 years now, and let me tell you, it is the ONLY role I fit comfortably into these days, which is ultimately the reason I'm levelling a class that cannot heal. I feel like some diversity in the role I play would probably be beneficial. I am not very confident yet as a tank.

I know the fights. I have a grasp on rotation. We almost never wipe and those wipes are not always caused by me. I would call myself a competent blood death knight, just not a confident one. I think that shows through my play style because regardless of how a dungeon is going if there is an asshat in my group, they will be taunting actually, I think I'd like to call it what it is, bullying me.

I've responded accordingly. I never engage the asshat. I initiate a kick, and if that fails, I leave myself. I'm just tired of dealing with this and because the only behaviour I have control of is my own, I went frost and decided to quest the rest of the way to 90. I really like my blood spec, and I'm going to continue using it to solo while I collect pets for raiding with leashes. I just don't think I'm ready to tank LFD yet, and that's fine.

Also, I wanted to wish you all a Merry Christmas, again I'm sorry that I can't share in the spirit right now. I'm working on it.

Escort Quests in Dungeons Suck

For the past couple of weeks I have been leveling a new disc priest on a new server and have until now leveled completely through dungeons (the exception being levels 1 through 15) and have thoroughly enjoyed my time spent playing disc from the ground up. That is, until I got put in a group for my characters first run of Razerfen Downs. For those of you not familiar with the dungeon there is an NPC Quest giver named  Baelnistraz who gives out an escort quest, this would be fine if the quest were sharable; however, since you must accept his quest and then exchange it for the escort quest it is an unsharable chain and a huge pain in the butt and it is safe to say that none of my characters have successfully completed this quest. It's just too irritating.

Now, I'm the first one to admit I'm trying to level this character quickly, so this afternoon I decided to pick up the quest - the first one - the one that starts the chain. Directly after that someone started the escort part. I'm pretty easy going so I shrugged it off and saw it as an opportunity to get a little more exp and maybe a few scraps of cloth. The feral druid (read: kitty druid) did not take it this way, and immediately starts demanding that the escort portion be shared with him. Of coarse the quest is a chain and cannot be shared.

I should also mention that in groups I am the token quiet one. I sit back and heal. I have little to no interest in socializing with groups that are not on my server who I will probably never encounter again.

So, in true "quiet one" style, I sat back and let the drama deal with itself and did not get involved. Or at least, I thought I didn't. About halfway through the escort encounter I found myself back in Brill, where I had just purchased my new undead ponies. Apparently my silence had made me guilty of starting the quest, when I didn't even have the quest to begin with.

I know that getting kicked wasn't my fault, they were upset at not being able to complete the quest and needed someone to blame and I was easy to pin that on. It just... well, it upset me. Other than this I cannot remember the last time I was kicked from a group, and I usually equate being kicked with being bad and it's painful to feel like you weren't good enough, even when you've done nothing wrong.

Rationally though despite however much I hope that group wiped after kicking me it wasn't really their fault that they kicked me either. Ultimately it was a design flaw that got me removed from that group. If the quest were able to be shared that druid never would have mistaken my silence for guilt, because it wouldn't have mattered who started the escort.

Also: when things go wrong, it is not always the healers fault.