The Pink Pigtail Inn Awards of 2010 – The instances

Ladies and Gentlemen!

May I ask for your attention for a little while? I hope you've grabbed a drink, in case you haven't help yourself over at the bar; it's set on free for all tonight. This is a special occasion as you all know. Time has come to announce the winners of The Pink Pigtail Inn List of 2010.

It’s quite an extensive list, so I’ve decided to chop it into four parts. We’ll start off lightly with an appetizer, namely the instance categories.

Next up will be a hotch potch soup, which I’ve labelled “Things we saw in-game”, which contains miscellaneous WoW-related classes.

After this it’s time for the main course – the community. And finally - hopefully this week - I’ll proudly present the dessert, which I think is what a majority of you care most about anyway – the Blogosphere awards.

I called for nominations a couple of weeks ago, and I got a lot of comments, letters and suggestions posted on other blogs and I want to thank you all for the input. I may not have followed your advice (which actually would be rather undoable, since it’s pointing in all sorts of directions), but it has definitely given me inspiration and helped me to sort out my own thoughts.

The rules once again, in case someone missed it.
- Winners who have gotten it previous year are not eligible for the same category the following year.
- The intention is that the list if possible should reflect content that was released during or very close to 2010.
- Any content from Cataclysm including the Shattering patch will not be taken into consideration.

And now I think we’re ready for the appetizer! So let’s head back in time and remember the instances from 2010.

Ahem…. To be absolutely honest with you I must admit that there wasn’t much of a competition. There weren’t exactly a swarm of instances launched this year, when Blizzard still followed the Wrath concept: “You shall only raid in one instance at a time and you shall raid it so many times that you never ever want to see it again” rather than the TBC and Cataclysm concept: “We offer parallel raid instances to give you a choice and some variation of scenery.”

However: tradition is tradition, so let’s stick to it and announce the first category:

Best raid instance

Nominated: Icrecrown Citadel, Ulduar.

I wouldn't believe that there would be any competition in this category. I dont' think there is a single raider out there who would rank Ruby Sanctum as a better instance than ICC.

And since Ulduar won the category for 2009, it was basically disqualified from the start. Everyone didn't agree with this though. Sthenno argued that Ulduar was just so good that it deserves to break the rules. "ICC was fine, but calling it the best while Ulduar is still around seems like it might be illegal."

Shintar nominated ICC, while adding: "It was good for a while, but it was annoying and tedious for even longer".

The winner is: Icecrown Citadel!

Motivation: I almost gave in to the idea to give Ulduar the award a second time, but in the end it goes to ICC. After all, no one can deny that it was a well crafted instance with a lot of interesting mechanics, including the green dragon that gave healers a bit of variety to the normal staring on the raid health bars. The LK fight alone, which included several challenging phases and even a piece of cinematic - was good enough to motivate an award. There was nothing wrong about ICC per se. The fact that we didn't have anything else to raid for almost a year is an entirely different issue.

Least successful raid instance

Nominated: Ruby Santcum; Naxxramas, ToC

It was pretty easy not to like Ruby Sanctum, that's for sure. Here are a sample from the comments:

"Odd tuning next to the already heavily nerfed ICC. Would have been better if released earlier.

"A lot of trash for loot no one needed."

"The timing of its release seemed off. It came when people were burned out on raiding and waiting on Cata."

"The least successful instances aren't actually those that people complain about, it's those that they don't even care to go into. There was only one such raid that fit that bill this year: the Ruby Sanctum. I think it's a bit of a shame actually because Halion wasn't a terrible boss. He just felt kind of out of place, both in terms of lore and in terms of difficulty."

The winner is: Ruby Sanctum!

Motivation: I agree with what's been sad. I'll just add this final one, from Rhii:

“We didn't run this on my server. Nobody hardly ran it, guilds didn't run it. PUGs didn't run it. Nobody ran it. I wanted to run it, but if people stay away in droves, something's wrong.”

A boss that no one cares about doing can hardly be considered successful. It felt as if the effort Blizzard had put into that fight was half hearted. Their attention, as well as the attention of the players, was already turned towards Cataclysm.

Most longed for instance

Nominated: Ruby Sanctum, Cataclysm, Coliseum, Frost boss in Wintergrasp, Halls of Reflection/The ICC instances, Black Temple, Heroic Deadmines/Heroic SFK

There were more nominations in this category than I had anticipated. Not really putting much thought into it, I reckoned it was Ruby Sanctum, since it was the only content that had been released. I was wrong.

Toravon in VoA was launched in February, and I reckon some players waited his arrival with huge expectations. Personally I didn't to be honest. I never thought that the VoA was that much of fun. If anything I associate it to all sorts of PuG failures, including "ooops I'm saved" incidents, ninja looting and unreasonable gear score and "already have achievement" expectations. Yet another boss wouldn't change anything.

I agree that Halls of Reflection was an interesting and challenging instance that we had waited for a long time to get; at last a new addition to the 5-mans. But since it was launched in December 2009, the longing was already something in the past.

So what about Ruby Sanctum then? Well, the more I think, the more I realize that there probably weren't that many players who really, really longed for it. We knew it was nothing but a filler. Most people were just waiting for Cataclysm and couldn't be bothered anymore with Wrath at that point.

So I decided to listen to advice from the readers.

The winner is: Black Temple!

Motivation: This might be a bit of a cheat: the list is supposed to cover content from 2010. But you could as well read this category as something we longed for that we had left behind. This year's nostalgic trip. I will leave the word to Shintar, who gave the suggestion:

"I'm finding it hard to pick anything here because we spent all year longing for Cataclysm. I don't think anyone really longed for Ruby Sanctum to come out (and if they did, they were probably disappointed quite quickly). I suppose some of us were longing for the Ulduar days, but Ulduar already won this category last year. Personally I think I mostly longed for the Black Temple, remembering what it was like for raiding to truly hold my interest until the very end of an expansion."

The End
And that's all for today. We'll soon be back with the continuation of the PPI list of 2010. Cheers!

A view from the bottom of the learning curve

Two weeks away from WoW was all it took for me to tumble down all the way down the learning curve back to the sewer level, where I started four years ago.

This was obvious as I logged in last weekend after my holiday absence.

I stared in disbelief at the screen, getting more and more nauseous as the camera nervously flipped up and down. You were supposed to control this thing with your mouse, weren’t you?
Was something broken or was this how it worked? How was I supposed to move my toon? Had I ever even played this game at all?

So this was my character, Larísa. A mage apparently. Level 85, it said, whatever that could mean.

Catching up
Slowly I recalled what this was about. Oh yes. There had been this expansion coming right before my holidays. In the middle of packing and other preparations I had managed to press her up to end game level, but not much more than that.

And now I was back and within 72 hours our first 25 man raid was scheduled, and I needed not only to remember how to play WoW, but also to make Larísa raid ready. It wasn’t anyone else who had required me to be prepared to go in such a short time, but I wanted to. This would be the first 25 man raid since June last year, and you all know what it’s like to get back to school after the summer vacation. There’s something special in the air in the first raid of the season. I just didn’t want to miss it.

But where to start, what to do? I was lost, so lost. And also increasingly ill, not just because of the view of the screen, but because all those germs we escaped in India seem to have been assembling in Sweden to have a sneaky assault on me as soon as I came home.

It was a challenging task, but somehow I did it. Don’t ask me how though, because those first few days are a bit hazy in my memory, an equal mix of chain running heroics and chain running to the bathroom.

Enough to say: when Adrenaline stood at the top of Bastion of Twilight Tuesday night, ready to enter for the first time, I was there.

I was dressed up in mostly heroic gear and even a couple of epics thanks to a very wealthy and equally generous guildie. I had the reputation enchants I needed and I had even managed to level first aid to max, which was a bit of a pain, especially since I levelled my tailoring profession at the same time. (A tip to anyone in the same predicament – if the cloth is dirty expensive at your server, take a treasure finding potion that gives you extra loot and find a spot for aoe-farming. Even with a price of 200 g a pot, it pays off and it saved my day.)

Climbing the learning curve
Gearing up is one thing though, learning how to play is something completely different. You can be as raid ready as you like gear wise, but this doesn’t help much if you’ve lost the feeling for how to play WoW.

This has made me think of learning curves. I’m admittedly not the quickest of climbers, and I tend to start out horribly low as we’re learning new encounters. Eventually I will always “get it”, but not quite as fast as the quickest learners in our guild.

But if I think about this first week back in WoW, I don’t feel as if I’m just at the bottom of a learning curve I need to climb. It’s more as if I’ve fallen down into a dark pit hole, losing skills I believed I already mastered.

When you think of learning how to ride a bicycle, it’s a one-time-only. Once you’ve learned how to do it, it’s there. You won’t forget how you do it, either you practice or not. You can mount a bicycle 10 years later and you’ll still not fall.

Playing WoW is different. Apparently you can de-climb the curve and de-learn things you knew, leaving you with no choice but to start over again.

A headless chicken
Partly I figure it’s the result of the class changes. Mages have gotten a couple of new spells that need to be squeezed, not only into my action bars, but also into my mindset, habits and muscle memory. It’s not done overnight.

Another reason for my struggles is probably that the difficulty level has stepped up considerably since Wrath. Some of the heroic bosses feel more like raid bosses than anything else. This is basically something I welcome; it means that also non-raiders can get access to interesting and challenging content. So it’s not as if I’m asking for nerfs, not at all.

But the fact remains, more than once have I felt like a headless chicken – in heroics as well as in raids - and I can’t help feeling a bit let down by myself.

Why I can’t pull my gameplay together and climb the learning curves as quick and easily as my fellow guildies? What am I doing here, still crawling around in the sewer?

However, this isn’t going to be a post that ends in misery, despair and self-bashing. I refuse to give up! I’ve climbed hills like this before and damned me if I won’t be able to climb it again!
As a reminder I’ve changed my title from Merrymaker to The Patient. Even if I geared up in two days I can’t expect myself to re-learn my class with all the changes there have been to it in the same amount of time. All I can do is to keep going, spend some times at the dummies, read up, ask fellow mages for advice and then and practice, practice, practice, Eventually I’ll get it.

The juggling experience
If I have any doubts about it, I’ll just think back at what I did in India. I spent most of my days lazily drifting in the ocean or reading novels on the beach. But I had brought one project with me: a set of juggling balls. I had decided to once for all learn how to juggle, which was quite ambitious for someone who lacks any sense for ball handling whatsoever.

The balls came with a leaflet, where you were told you could learn three-ball juggling in seven steps. “Anyone can learn this within one hour”, assured the writer. Well, that wasn’t entirely true. For me it took one and a half week of daily practice before I got it. But that’s not the point.

The point is that I didn’t give up. And I didn’t care about the quizzing glares I got from other beach visitors as I publicly displayed my shortcomings in tossing as little as one or two balls.

I just kept going. Not for long periods, just ten minutes per hour, day after day. Sometimes I fell back on the learning curve, starting to fail at step five, which I previously had mastered. In those moments I went back a few steps and practiced more until I had them working properly, before taking it back to where I was.

I didn’t bash on myself, I didn’t ask why it took me hours and hours of juggle training when the leaflet said it would take just 60 minutes. I just did it anyway, my way, enjoying the learning process as such, not attempting to take shortcuts as I climbed the curve in my own pace.

I left India with a moment forever burned into my memory: the feeling of successfully doing three-ball juggling as the sun dived into the ocean at the peaceful beach in Goa. Twenty times in a row I cast the balls without dropping them once. I don’t think anyone noticed. But I’ll never forget how I felt inside.

And whenever I’ll find the view in the sewers at the bottom of the learning curve just too depressing, whenever I’ll start doubting that I can be a true asset to our raid team rather than a burden, I will think about my juggling experience.

If I could learn how to juggle, I can learn how to do anything.

Even how to play my mage properly in Cataclysm.

Cheers!

The New Year Reset

So it’s New Year’s Eve tonight. And thinking aloud, I want to throw out a question:

Isn’t this day the pinnacle of broken dreams and lost illusions?

The expectations are so huge. While it’s perfectly OK to have a less-than-exhilarating Christmas, spent on your own or with family members who’d all rather be somewhere else, New Year is quite the opposite.

You should be with your friends at a huge crazy party where everyone drinks floods of champagne and laughs all night long - pleasantly dizzy but never embarrassingly drunk. As the bells start ringing at midnight you lose yourself in a soft and sparkling kiss with the love of your life (or at a minimum a wonderful flirt of the evening.)

In reality it’s never as fun as it is on TV. It’s more like a cruel reminder that yet another year has passed of your life, and what did you do of it? Where did all the dreams and promises go?

I don’t think you see as much faked happiness and as much true and honest loneliness as you do at New Year.

But for all the bitterness it carries, there’s still something about it that I love. The fireworks. As you might now, enjoying some fireworks after eating a chocolate cake in WoW is one of my guilty pleasures. And you can only imagine how childishly enthusiastic I am about them in real life. Of course it’s a complete waste of money and effort, the ultimate sandcastle, an instant flash of beauty, lost and gone within a few seconds, only leaving a fading trail in our memories. But it’s one of the aspects of what it means to be human.

A reset
New Year is also something of a reset, resembling to the release of a new WoW expansion or at least a content patch. Your calendar has still some empty spots; nothing is set in stone. This is the time and place to make those decisions you’ve been pondering on. Maybe level up some new skill, explore a new zone of the world or even go through a complete remake of yourself, going from a forsaken to a gnome – or the opposite way. Even if the timeline is a theoretical construction and not a physical fact, the impact is undeniable.

The world is reset, and if the American dream that “anything is possible if you just try hard enough” actually is a bit of a lie, it’s still true that many of us only use a fraction of our full potential. All dreams can’t come true. But some can. And New Year reminds us of that.

I don’t think I’ve ever given any New Year solution. Or if I have, it wasn’t serious enough for me to remember it afterwards, so I reckon I broke it pretty quickly.

Oh, or wait. I actually did write down a couple of WoW related New Year's resolutions two years ago. My compliance with them has admittedly been so and so. But it’s a good reminder to glance over them again. The order in my bags and bank could be better, can’t it always? However it’s not completely out of control, in the sense that I have some space. I still don’t charge for mage portals, but if someone asks me about the fee, my reply is “what you think it is worth to you”. I still know how to do the Heigan dance! I don’t think you’ll ever forget it once you know the steps.

Most important though is my promise to see to that I keep having fun playing WoW. This means following my heart rather than the crowd, making sure the game doesn’t turn into a job rather than entertainment.

Spending the night
There are many ways to spend New Year. I will spend it 30 k feet up in the air homeward bound, crossing a number of time zones. If I wanted to I could have a reason to drink champagne throughout the whole night. It's the New Year that never ends.

Some of you will spend it with friends and for a few of you it will be a blast and a new beginning of something, possibly a romance. For others it will be a night of disappointment.

Perhaps a few of you will spend New Year in Azeroth. And if you do, don’t feel awkward or ashamed about it. If you’re with friends, having fun, you’re probably way better of than many of those who celebrate New Year in a more conventional way.

Regardless of what you’ll do, I hope you’ll have a great night, where expectations and reality somehow end up at the same level.

Now please head over to the bar disk, have a glass of free champagne and join me in a toast!

Happy New Year!

Christmas smorgasbord alert in Azeroth

Have you noticed how few boars there are around in WoW these days? Or maybe there are a few of them that have escaped Deathwing’s massacre, but you certainly don’t run around and kill them as frequently as you used to do back in the days. And I wonder what this will mean to the Christmas celebrations.

At least in Northrend, which is supposed to be heavily influenced by Scandinavia, this could be an issue. There isn’t very much Christ in our Christmas, there never was. It’s still a Midwinter blot in disguise, where we oblige to our ancient desire for meat, making oversized smorgasboards. A huge Christmas ham http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julskinka is mandatory, and it’s usually accompanied by all sorts of sausages, meatballs, ribs and other animal body parts.

To be honest, I’d rather call it brutal, bordering to disgusting, than tasty. However it’s a part of our heritage. You can’t be serious leaving those Vikings at Howling Fjord starving while boars happily walk around in Azeroth at full health. What are they supposed to eat in its place? Gold clover?

I think I see a pattern though. I suppose you haven’t missed that Vashj’ir, is entirely under water, teaming with all sorts of life including shellfish. And you might also know that Blizzard’s European office is situated in France. Now, you may not know it, but in France you don’t eat ham for Christmas. They’re far more sophisticated than the pagan descendents from the Vikings. As far as I’ve been told you’re more likely to have oysters and Champagne. Yep. That’s what I’d call a stylish Christmas!

You see the connection?

No more pigs to kill. It’s time to collect oysters for the French Christmas tables. It might not be in the game yet, but it’s only a matter of time. Blame the French influence! And you know where you heard it first.

Either you’re celebrating Christmas, some other festivity or nothing at all, I hope you’ll have a great weekend and that Greatfather Winter will bring you something nice, preferably a little more fun than the rifle from last year. I never saw the point of it. It still fills a lot in my bank, in case it will dawn upon me one day.

Here’s a toast for a Happy Winter Veil.

Cheers!

Call for nominations for The Pink Pigtail Inn list of 2010

Ladies and gentlemen, may I call for your attention?

I know your minds are currently blown away by the Cataclysm, but nevertheless I have a small request for a little bit of assistance. You can look at it as a piece of entertainment, something to keep you going while the activity in the blogopshere goes down due to the Christmas season.

For the third year in row, I'm going to put together The Pink Pigtail Inn list, where I appoint winners in a number of categories, covering different aspects of WoW and the WoW community. during the past year. And just like I did 2009, I'm asking for your assistance to refresh my memory.

Who do you think should win those categories, and for what reason? Suggest your favorites for one or several categories, as many as you like. You can write it in a comment to this post, or send an e-mail to larisascorner at gmail dot com. If you're a blogger you're free to put up a post about it, just make sure that I see it by leaving a comment or sending me a note.

The rules

First of all: here are the rules:

• You can nominate almost anyone including yourself. But you can't nominate Larísa or The Pink Pigtail Inn for obvious reasons. And you can't nominate someone who previously has received the award for the same category. (Another category is OK). The reason is that I want to share the love a bit. It makes it more fun for everyone.
  
• The list is intended to focus on 2010. Cataclysm arrived at the very end of the year, however I've decided that Cataclysm content will be ruled out from this list since there has been so little time to experience and evaluate the new content. You can nominate anything that arrived before the Shattering patch. It's OK to nominate content that was released in 2009 since 2010 was a rather thin year when it comes to new tabards, pets, instances etc.
• You can suggest a completely new category and nominate a candidate for it. I might like it so much that I'll pick it up.
• The jury consists of Larísa. My decision will definitely be inspired by your suggestions, especially if they come with good arguments. But it's not a popularity contest where the one with the most votes automatically will win. And no, I don't take bribes.
• The prize for the category winners is the same as always: fame and honor, a special seat at The Pink Pigtail Inn and a virtual toast. If the winners want to design some kind of badge to decorate their blog, they're free to do so. But as far as I'm concerned, all I give out is my love and admiration.
  
• You can keep nominating until I've announced the list, which won't happen until I'm back from my trip, in the beginning of January.
  

The categories
And now over to the categories. Under each one I've listed the winners from previous years, who accordingly can't be nominated again. In a couple of cases I've already decided to change the name of the category slightly to make it a little wider.

1. Best raid instance

2009: Ulduar
2008: Zul Aman

2. Least successful raid instance

2009: Eye of Eternity
2008: Sunwell

3. Most longed for instance

2009: Ulduar
2008: Magisters Terrace

4. Silliest gold sink

2009: The Dun Niffelem Mammoths
2008: Gold Eterium Band

5. Biggest addition to the game

2009: Dual spec
2008: Achievements

6. Best quest

2009:The Quel'delar chain
2008: The Wrathgate quest chain

7. Ugliest tabard

2009:Wyrmrest Accord
2008: Competitor’s Tabard

8. Favorite non combat pet

2009: Onyxia Whelpling
2008: The Phoenix Hatchling

9. Biggest community controversy

Comment: Renamed from "Most juicy guild drama". I decided to make the category wider. Please not that there's a special category for the hottest blog topic.

2009: The Martin Fury incident
2008: The merging of SK Gaming and Nihilum into Ensidia

10. Most charming Blizzard employee

2009: Patric Beja
2008: Ghostcrawler

11. Best podcast

2009: Blue Plz!
2008: Twisted Nether

12. Biggest blog facelift

2009: Righteous Orbs
2008: World of Matticus

13. Most memorable blog post

2009: Archetypes of the Female Gamer, revisited
2008: Noob world reorder

14. Most noticed blogger breakthrough

2009: Greedy Goblin
2008: Chick GM

15.Most solid content provider

2009: Welcome to Spinksville
2008: Tobold’s

16. Most hugged blogger

2009: Phaelia and BRK
2008: Big Bear Butt

17. Hottest blogosphere topic

Comment: The category is renamed from "Blog drama of the year" to make it a little wider.

2009: The Ferraro debacle
2008: N/A

18. Best writer

2009: Tamarind at Righteous Orbs
2008: N/A

And that was the list. Now please go ahead make your voice heard! I'm looking forward to the input.

A letter from the Time vault

My dear guests!

This is your innkeeper Larísa speaking, bringing a message from the future. Or the past. Whatever.

I always get a strange feeling when I prewrite blogposts for delayed publication as I’m off for holidays. It makes me think of Hari Seldon, the future predicting guru in one of the big reading experiences of my childhood, Foundation. You know the guy who every now and then makes a magical appearance as a projection in the time vault, demonstrating how he new everything in advance. Or maybe not.

Like it or not, there are things in the world that are beyond our control. Aircrafts can crash. (Even if it’s a lot less likely than that the car crashes on the way to the airport.) Servers can go down, wiping PPI from the world. And WoW could theoretically cease to exist (even if it seems rather unlikely at this very moment.) You just never know.

But provided that there won’t pop up an unpredictable pesky mutant, I predict that as you’re reading this post, you’ll find me strolling bare feet along a far distant shore as you read this. I’ll listen to the roar of the ocean rather than to the humming of a computer fan, I’ll fill my lungs with air rather than with dust and I’ll let my mind drift away to the stars rather than to Azeroth.

However, I haven’t left the inn to rot in the dust. As you might see, at least if you’re actually visiting the inn and not just reading it through a reader, I’ve hired someone who will keep an eye on the place in my absence, namely Tamarind of Righteous Orbs. He has promised to do some dusting and refilling of the kegs, and I think he scare away a troll or two if needed as well. If you notice anything weird going on at the inn, just send him a heads-up to morewitthanhonestyatgmaildotcom. I’ve trusted him with the keys.

I have put up a couple of posts for my absence. Nothing special, just a little greeting here and there and something to keep you occupied in case you run out of things to do. (Hm… wonder what that could be? I’ll give you a clue: it’s a PPI tradition!)

I’ll be back in January, probably tanned, but also quite clueless about anything WoW. From previous experiences of taking a break from WoW, I know that it only takes me a few days to completely forget about how to gear, what spells to cast or even how to move my character and use the camera properly. My muscle memory seems to have the span of five days as a maximum.

And that’s about it I think. I’ve filled my bags with books and left any electronic device at home. It’s time to unplug, which probably isn't a day too early.

Here's what I'd like you to do while I'm away:

• Be nice to Tam.
• Take care of each other.
• Have fun.
  

See you on the other side of the New Year!

Hugs

Larísa

I dinged 85 and went straight to Naxx

So, I reached 85 the other night. The first thing I did was to train my new mage toy, the godsend Time Warp. Of course. But do you know what I did next?

I went straight to Naxxramas. Yes, the same old pyramid that has been hanging over Northrend the last two years. It hasn’t’ been tweaked or upgraded, there isn’t any new surprise boss in there. And yet, there I found myself at a date with Patchwerk.

How come? Well, it turned out that it was the weekly raid quest. And you might not be aware of it, but that quest gives a decent 138 justice points for just a couple of minutes of effort. Not bad for a point- and gear-thirsty freshly dinged 85. It felt weird to say the least, and in a couple of weeks I don’t think it would be worth it. But as it is now, it’s not bad. After all a normal LFD dungeon only gives you half of it.

Talking about patchwork, with an “o”, that is what this post will be: some random observations about Cataclysm that I wanted to share before I take a break from Azeroth for a couple of weeks.

Item level – the new Gearscore?
There have been a couple of things that have been bubbling around in my mind. One is the issue of Item level. I’ve never been obsessing over Gearscore before, but I find myself way more interested in the average item level number that Blizzard provides you with in game. I learned that I needed to reach 329 to be let into a heroic instance and suddenly that became a goal per se. I looked for whatever upgrade I could get – through justice points or at AH and then I equipped it and waited eagerly to see if my average level had raised enough to reach the magical number. “Oh, noes, only 328, bugger! I need something more”

I wouldn’t go as far as to equip a completely irrelevant, useless item just because it has a higher level number, in order to play tricks on the system. But can certainly see the temptation.

I wonder if this development is for the good. We’ve discussed the pros and cons of Gearscore to death, and I’ve heard several commenters saying that you certainly need a simple evaluation tool, but that Gearscore is too dumb to make the work properly. In its place they recommend more advanced addons such as Elitist group. However, with the arrival and emphasis on item level, Blizzard might take us in a different direction. It’s way dumber for sorting purposes than Gearscore, since it doesn’t say anything about the usefulness of the gear or whether you’ve done anything about it, using enchants or gems. However, I’ve already seen it in practice as someone was announcing in /2, looking for a group to make some dungeon achievements. The requirement to join the group was to have an average gear level of 340 or more. It remains to see if this was a unique event or a beginning of an unfortunate trend.

A Very Manly Staff
While we’re talking about gear I have to mention the Very Manly Staff that I got from the new ring of blood-quest in Twilight Highlands. I’ve had a lot of weapons over the years, and I don’t remember anything about most of them. They all look the same to me; there are only so many ways you can design a gnome dagger. But this weapon will no doubt become one of those that stick in my memory. It can’t be missed.

For one thing, it’s huge. Especially on a gnome. I’ve always thought that my mage has some kind of back problem, since she’s sort of crouching as she runs. Now I know why. I would have that too if I was supposed to carry around such a burden. Oversized? Yep, you bet.

The second feature is that it moves. It’s got some kind of mechanism with spikes that randomly are folded in and out for no apparent reason.

And then there’s this name. Very Manly Staff. I don’t know exactly what it is in it that makes it so manly, but I suspect that the devs just wanted to bring the e-peen measuring to a new level with a wry smile. So far I haven’t noticed any beard growth or other changes to Larísa. Well, apart from that bad back then.

Just looking at the staff makes me a little giddy. There’s something irresistible about a pink pigtailed gnome running around with a Very Manly Staff, as if she was showing the finger to players who think that only a Big Bad Guy can kill a Big Bad Monster. Or carry a Very Manly Staff.

Painful quest
If you think about getting it for yourself, I recommend you strongly to not try it at anywhere near peak time on your server. I’m on a PvE server myself, but the competition around the quest giver, buried under a mountain of mounted players, was so fierce that it felt more like PvP. Some players amused themselves (or was stupid enough to not know better) by snatching the target from other groups who just had started the event. This resulted in repeatedly failed quests and prolonged waiting times – for everyone. If people would just have queued up nicely and taken the quests in order, it would have gone ten times quicker. But WoW players just don’t do that, unless they’re technically forced into a queue like when they’re logging in.

So to put it shortly: this quest is currently a pain in the ass unless you do it at 6 am in the morning. And I think Blizzard should think it over, if they couldn’t put it up somehow differently, through phasing, instancing or some other solution.

Raiding 5-mans
And a final note: I’ve dipped my toe into my first heroic dungeon. It felt like a raid. A raid where I’m constantly active – sheeping, throwing orbs, putting up rings of frost, counterspelling, decursing, you name it.

It was long time since it was as fun to play a mage. I lost count on how many corpse runs I did. But I did them with a smile.

Edit: Tarnop pointed out in a comment that the Manly staff probably is named after a player in Elitist Jerks called - yes, you guessed it - Manly! If you check out his armory he's currently wearing it, even though I don't doubt that it soon will be upgraded. Thanks for the heads-up!