Eighty

After more than three years of playing World of Warcraft, I've finally pushed a character up to level 80. This is possibly a record for slowness. The winner is my night elf hunter Siegrune.

I know why it's taken me so long to get here (and for non-WoW-players, 80 is a significant milestone but not the end of the line of levelling, there are ten levels to go before I get to 90 and the endgame). I was continually upset and frustrated by the density of WoW, the enormous number of things to be done in each area — far more than any one avatar could achieve before having to move on because they had levelled beyond the area's quests. In many cases, I solved this by "freezing" the characters' level so that they can continue doing quests without gaining experience, but oddly enough I found that I lost interest in the characters once I had frozen them. Fact is, that I have not played on with a toon that I did freeze.

I never froze Siegrune though, just ran her through the regions of Azeroth until she learned flying and went to Outland at level 60 or so. I played out the long and intricate quest chains there as far as I could, until it became clear at level 74 that she was (a) far beyond the standard of the continent, and nonetheless (b) less than halfway through the quests! This was something of a dilemma: I wanted to finish them all off, yet didn't want to freeze (and probably abandon) yet another character. After a day or two of dithering, I decided to have her leave Outland and move to Northrend, which was more appropriate for her level. Once made, the decision was somehow quite lightening, like the lifting of a burden I didn't realize I was under.

She's now pushing at level 81, and it's time to leave Northrend although I've only scratched the surface there. But she will move on serenely, without a backward glance at all the incomplete quests and stories. Somebody else, another character, will follow on to complete them.

What I don't know is why it was she who achieved this milestone. All this time I've been talking about tanking and healing and so on, and how DPSers are coasting on the tank's risk-taking. So why haven't any of my many tanks got this far? It may be significant that Siegrune has probably done the least number of dungeons of any character I've made, she has been levelled almost entirely on quests in the world. My tanks and healers all got worn down by the thanklessness of their task, by the snark and grumbling when the dungeon went badly and the thoughtless silence when it went well.

On hunting

I've made yet another WoW character, a human Survival hunter called Siegrune. (Yes, another Wagnerian name. So sue me.) It's going surprisingly well. So well, in fact, that I am about to boast a little.

Combat-analysis of my latest dungeon run

Have a look at that top line. Fifty percent of the total damage was done by me. Damn! To prove that wasn't just a fluke, let me boast a second time.

Combat-analysis of my latest Arathi Basin battle

Unfortunately I didn't think to take a screenshot of the scoreboard at the end of the battle. I was only about eighth on the list there (ranked by kill-points). I killed seven Hordies personally, and assisted in killing another thirty or so, and only died four times.

Until I saw this Recount analysis, I was very pleased with my battleground score. (I still am, to be honest.) But given that I did the second-highest damage of the team, I feel that I should have been much higher up the kill-point ranking. My inference is that I am spending too much of my time and energy attacking targets that I cannot kill (heavily armoured paladins and the like) and not enough on the softies (rogues, priests and mages). On the other hand, it is a team effort and my chipping away at those paladins and warriors helped the team kill them.

It's that old conflict between personal ambition and the common good.

Tank

An embarrassingly long time ago I wrote:

I've had good runs through difficult dungeons, where the team moved as one and nobody died, and the difference is largely due to the tank. A good tank makes a good run, and a bad tank makes a bad run, whoever else is on the team. It's that simple.

Well it's not quite that simple, but the basic point remains valid. Since writing that I have spent a lot of time as a tank, and am enjoying it enormously. I started with a warrior, but am now power-levelling a "tankadin" (paladin tank). She will probably be my first level 85 character — after nearly two years of playing WoW. This is possibly a record for slowness.

Paladins are a great class for naturally curious (or indecisive) people like myself, because they can fill every role in the game more or less well. They can heal and revive (but not as well as a Priest), deal damage, and take it in too (but not as well as a warrior); they can run up to a mob and beat the stuffing out of it with their hand weapons, or stand back and throw damage spells at it (but not as well as a shaman, mage or a warlock). I'm finding the combination of tanking plus being able to bless, heal and revive teammates to be great fun.

They do have deficits compared to more specialized classes (intentionally so, else everyone would just play a paladin and the game would become monotonous). Warrior tanks are much better at holding the attention of groups of mobs, and have instant long-range attacks in case they need to persuade a mob to leave their healer alone. I'm not sure whether I will stick with the tankadin; for now my plan is to level her up to my warrior tank and play both side-by-side for a while, to see which I prefer.

I think what I like about tanking — and this was true of healing as well — is the responsibility that it carries. The tank and the healer are responsible for the safety and success of the party, and bear all of the risk.To my mind there is no significantly less challenge in DPSing, because nothing bad can ever happen to the DPSer if the tank and the healer do their jobs well (assuming that the DPSers don't stand in the fire*). The only way that a DPSer can endanger the party is by getting carried away and pulling new mobs into an already complex fight, overpowering the tank and depleting the healer's mana. If they avoid that mistake, and it's easily avoided with a little common sense, the worst trouble they can cause is to slow the team down.

This is not to say that the DPSers are unnecessary! The role of the tank is not to kill mobs, but to make them hate him more than anyone else in the party. Without good damage-dealers even low-level fights would soon be lost, as the injury to the tank would slowly but surely drain the healer's mana dry. No DPS = healer OOM** = dead tank = wipe.

If I say so myself, I am a pretty good tank. In many of my runs, nobody dies — which is as big a boast for a tank as it is for doctors. Updated In the interests of truth and keeping my ego in check, I should mention that tonight's trip to Gnomeregan wiped once and lost two players in single incidents.

* WoW shorthand for "doing something incredibly stupid."
** Out Of Mana, unable to cast any healing spells.

My third life

I've been slaughtering my way through World of Warcraft for a forthnight now, and have finally arrived at what feels like a character and a mode of being that I can enjoy. (I wrote about the differences and similarities between WoW and SL on my workshop blog.)

I've made a total of three characters so far, searching for a role that I felt comfortable playing. My first was basically my Dragon Age: Origins character recreated in WoW, a human female rogue. (All my characters are Alliance, amusingly enough, the Horde somehow just doesn't fit me at all.) She got up to level 11 before becoming distressed by the relentless killing. I then created a Night Elf huntress, but found her fey gestures and slowness to attack really annoying. (Yes, thank you, I am aware of and amused by the contrast between my statements about these characters.)

I went back to the rogue for a while, to see whether I might get across the hump of moral unease about killing if I just kept at it long enough. As I was lying around dead one day (at the lower levels of experience and ability, one spends a fair amount of time dead), a stranger came running past, a priest. He stopped and without saying a word revived me, healed me and blessed me, and then just ran on about his business before I'd realized what was happening. I couldn't even say a quick "ty" before he was gone.

I had an epiphany in that moment. "That is something that I could do, that I could enjoy doing," I said to myself, and immediately went back to create a priestess. She has been having a wonderful time, running about WoW blessing and healing random strangers. She's joined a few questing groups as a Healer, which basically means standing well back and ensuring that the fighters don't die; the group system in WoW means that all who take part in a quest get the experience benefits of it — so she doesn't even have any disbenefit in moving up the level hierarchy.

As I said at the beginning, I think I've found a role that I can be comfortable playing. After the free trial ran out, I signed up for a three month subscription; we'll see at the end of that time whether I am still interested in continuing.

BBBC.2

Today's topic: Write about three positive things going on in your Second Life.

1) I started a little project last week: each day for a month, I would wear an outfit and hair and shoes from my inventory that I had never worn in public before. It's been great fun, even if some of the stuff I've found in there made me glad that nobody can peek in over my shoulder. I'm photographing the results and posting them to a Flickr set called 30/30.

And yes, before you ask, it is easily possible for me to go a month without wearing something I've ever worn before. I remembered as I was writing this that I have several folders full of freebie stuff that kind people gave me back when I was a particularly clueless newbie, some of which I've not even looked into. I reckon I could easily get two months out of them; and if you count shades of the same hairstyle as separate items, I could get through nearly a year. Boots and shoes are harder, I haven't got nearly as many of those.

2) This weekend I reconnected to a very dear friend who has been absent for much of the last year. We spent a lovely evening (my time) dancing at the Blues Junkyard and doing some high-quality plotting and conniving. It was wonderful to talk to her again.

But boo to the other patrons of the Junkyard for being so stingy with their tips! The DJ made a mere L$1150 for two hours' work in front of an audience of maybe 35 avs.

3) I discovered some great live music. I met Grace McDunnough in AVid last weekend, and she invited me to a concert that she was giving later on that day. That was delightful: she has a marvellous blues voice, deep and rich and husky, and plays a pretty mean guitar too. I'm so glad we happened to bump into each other, and/but I wish that she'd play some Euro-friendly concert times (hint hint hint).

Shopping news

I want to pass on news of some really good animations that I recently discovered. I hate to call them "sex anims," although that is definitely what they are, because they are not the crude fuck-scenes that one gets so tired of seeing in clubs and on beaches: these have gestures and facial expressions, virtual eye-contact even. The participants (let's call them that) behave as though they know and like each other. These are animations for lovers.

The stores in question are Sticky Candy and Primal Dreams, the latter is particularly delightful. Sticky Candy has some safe-for-public-use single and friends' poses too.

Unusually, both stores encourage you to visit with a partner and try the animations out. Perhaps this liberality is a consequence of the shops' being sequestered on the new adult-rated continent; if so, then for the first time I would find myself seeing sense in the Lindens' decision to split the world up in this way.

Enjoy.

Big

I just bought 34 thousand square metres of mainland.

I'm feeling somewhere between excited (huge tracts of land!) and terrified (the tier! my gods, the tier!!)

It's not my land as such, it's ex-Play as Being land that a group of us decided to rescue when it was put up for sale; but I am the one who did the work and signed the papers and (right now at least) is going to pay the tier. We'll see how this works out over time.

The sexiest boots in SL

What happened was, I found a marvellous outfit on sale at Serene Sensations — but it needed a pair of fab boots to go with it. I called up my fashion adviser Eidolon and asked her "Where would you go for a pair of knee-high high-heeled patent leather boots? I need some drop-dead-sexy boots, some You can't afford me boots."

She laughed and gave me a stack of landmarks, and we started a shopping tour. Found these at the third store we visited, Bax Coen Designs, and it was lust at first sight. They were on sale, marked down 50% to a mere L$700, but I'd have paid the full price without batting an eye.

Own horn, blowing

The brilliant and wonderful and somewhat exaggerating Corvi interviewed me for the Play as Being Chronicles. My favourite sentence from the interview: "We are all approximations and prototypes and just somehow doing the best we can."

I must go and soak my head in the tub for another hour, hopefully it will shrink back to normal size soon.

Workin' nine to five

Well, working anyway. I am delighted to announce that I've been hired by Pulse as their store manager / assistant / fixit-girl. This means that I will be spending even more time hanging out at the shop than I already do — but getting paid for it.

In the interests of clarity and disclosure of interests, I should point out this is a new development. My mentions of Pulse in previous posts were not paid for or directed by Eidolon and Lorac, but simply outpourings of my own enthusiasm. I wrote about their clothes and skins because I like them.

In other news but further in the same vein of own-horn-blowing, the Cushicle is damned nearly done! Woot. Stand by for photos.

Happy

I have been in a good mood all week, without any particular reason to tell. Or perhaps with many tiny little reasons that all add up to happiness. One thing that makes me happy is simply being busy, I like having things to do and people to do them with.

I am starting to make good friends in SL, to my surprise and pleasure, and have begun to prepare a home of my own where we might meet — and dance! One of the first things I did was to set up a tango dance animation pair. Watching myself dance in SL has made me want to begin dancing again in RL too, I should join a tango club and take some more lessons this summer.

Corvi and I are in the process of starting a kind of literary magazine in SL, loosely modelled on the New Yorker magazine: our desire is to present good, interesting writing which will be in but not about SL, as the New Yorker is not actually about Manhattan. This is still in very early stages, we are talking about what we would like to do.

My buddy Eidolon has started a business making skins and jewelry, and will open a store soon with a friend of hers, an artist who makes clothes, accessories and furniture. It's been exciting and quite amusing to see them working together, preparing the store; Corvi and I have been advising them on prices because they just have no idea, Lorac had set everything out far too cheaply for the quality of her work. Their store has a blog of its own, and is found in-world at Nip Tuck Island.

And I am working on a little building project: making a very slow vehicle. It will be a kind of flying sofa with cuddle and sitting poses, sleek like an airplane on the outside and satiny on the inside, with wood grain and soft furnishings and cut flowers, something like a mobile gazebo. I will post some photos here as it progresses.