Musings During Maintenance

It's been a pretty slow week. Festergut looks like he isn't budging for our little casual guild, so I've been concentrating on leveling an alt. Mage is my class of choice, and I've gotta say that questing and grinding is full of suck. At least, leveling a fire mage is full of suck: All the mages I know are sure to let me know exactly how retarded I am for not leveling frost. What can I say, I really like lighting things on fire.

Any class can look awesome on a harpoon-surfboard!

The thing I hated more than the fjord is having to arrange every pull so that I don't get gang stabbed and die. It feels like I'm in the Barrio. If I piss off the wrong local, fourteen mother fuckers come running, and I die horribly. It wasn't like that on my paladin/warrior. Just faceroll the aoe abilities and they're all dead before they have a chance to eat your face.

This isn't to say that all of my leveling experience has been bad. I'm actually really enjoying the lfg system (20 minute waits aside), in that I can actually do at level content, instead of just waiting to hit it up on heroic mode, which is sort of what happened with all of my other characters. I can just queue up as DPS, knock out a quest or 20, and temporarily pause my questing trend to do a random dungeon if it ever actually happens.

Although, even at my level, there are plenty of people who really should've stayed home. Just last night, a hunter and druid pair were picking on the lucky bastard that had queued up as a tank for not having full +def gear at level 77. It's level fucking 77! My gear looks like shit too. Be glad the LFG gods gave us a tank, and try not to scare him off by being an insufferable fuckwad.

I really hate myself sometimes.

Thoughts on 3.3

I can see that everyone has survived patch day, and more than a few people have rather positive things to say about the new level of content and the brand new features. Well, I suppose it's my responsibility to bring the negativity.

While the Dungeon Finder system looks quite nice, the execution on patch day was rather sloppy. The "one more hour... wait, another hour... wait... how do we install this stuff again?" of Blizzard's patch days aside, the new instance servers were far from stable once everything was online, and they remained unstable until about 6am the next day. Some people say "patch day blues" or something like that, but I've always been of the frame of mind that a company that has that many resources should have the capability of testing their systems and software before bringing it online for the public.

Now that everything finally seems to be evening out, there are some issues with the matchmaker that I just don't like. I select two out of the three possible roles when I pug, because I can do two, but it seems as though I always tank (on my warrior) or heal (on my paladin) without absolutely zero variation. Perhaps this is just something that reflects the way the population is divided between roles, but it is a little iritating. I mean, who wants to do the same thing -every- single 5 man dungeon run?

My last gripe (new dungeon difficulty isn't really a gripe at Blizzard) has to do with the people I've come across in my quest for random dungeon rewards. I know that Frozen Orbs haven't been a big deal since Naxx, but they're worth at least 30g on my server, which is equivalent to 2-3 wipes worth of repair bills. Not exactly negligible. And yet, in every group -but one- someone has waited until everyone else has greed rolled on an orb and then pressed the 'oh-so-convenient' need button to scoop it up at the last minute. I thought, at first, that it might have been some kind of server only thing... or maybe 'everywhere but my server.' But people were doing it despite their server of origin, ninja looting against people from their own servers, as well. At least one per group. 20% of WoW players are ninja-looting, asshats. Can that be right?

I know it's just a little, near worthless crafting item. But what do you think? Is it right for someone to just take something like that, without bothering to ask? I don't think so... and without a way to compile and an enforce a "do not group with" list, there's just nothing I can do about it.