2009 in hindsight

Yeah, I know, I was given a Christmas present by Tam and should perhaps work on that subject since she was so nice and all, but the servers just went down as I was levelling my priest and I don't have any good angles of attack yet. Without further ado, here's a meme I stole:

What did you do in the World of Warcraft in 2009 that you’d never done before?

I pugged raids, tons of them. This brough upon me some severe sanity loss and I don't think I've recovered yet. I realized that the task of leading PuG's is a very thankless one. I tried going the hard line, cause we all know that dictatorships and slavery gets shit done, and I'd seen too many wishy-washy PuG's with no proper leadershi(t)p to want to be like it. We all also know that dictators may make a few people happy, and pull the effort in the right direction, but they are still despotic bastards that do what they like, and generally end up dead. So yeah I've fallen out with a lot of people and I'm beginning to suspect it will always be like this. Much as I like there are fundamentals to my personality that I can't change and the friends that see through it are very good friends, and the people who can't stand it (they shouldn't have to stand stuff in the first place) distance themselves with good reason. I'm a very honest, outspoken and superlative person (stuff doesn't plain suck, they suck with the power of the biggest black hole in the universe with me) and sometimes that leads to me being an ass.

Oh and I also tanked, and did elemental DPS on my shammie. Both were fun. I think 2009 can be seen as the year when I started healing on him seriously as well, and that was also very fun.

What was your favorite new place that you visited?

This has to be Ulduar. The boss fights are very fresh and unique, the instance itself is enigmatic, beautiful and hard enough for the level of me and my guild. Karazhan, Ulduar and Icecrown citadel shows that Blizzard have some really good game designers. Trial of the Crusader was a bit of a letdown, although the mechanics are sort of interesting still. Granted, we haven't tried many hardmodes and they change things for the better, so I guess the interesting stuff is there, but well hidden (hardmodes are HARD).

What would you like to have in 2010 that you lacked in 2009?

Proper raiding progress - Trial was, as I said, very uninteresting and we killed all the bosses the weeks they came out except for Champions (took us a while to figure out the style of the encounter) who took us a week extra. Ulduar was halted by the summer - our guild went from 25 mans to 10 mans and we've kind of stuck to it lately. We lost a lot of raiders and recruited mostly people with gearing needs and the summer was spent farming Ulduar and making progress there - I famously posted our first Mimiron kill here, and we did some tries at Vezax and ultimately Yogg before getting sick of it. With the advent of raid lockout extensions, we have new hopes of killing Yogg. Of course, it won't be the same since we will be in at least partial ICC gear when we do it, but the damn thing has to die. It's a matter of skill, not gear (some nutcases killed him wearing only blues) so I still think it's something we need to do.

What was your biggest achievement of the year?

Killing General Vezax pre-nerf, probably. I mean sure, we were a lot later than most guilds, but we did it on our own terms and proved that we are a force to be reckoned with. I can't take credit for it, but I was the raid leader both for the first Mimiron and the first Vezax kills and that felt very good as well. After this, we haven't really had any bosses that have offered us any problems (except, again, Yogg, who we have a total of not more than ten proper tries at, and by proper I mean with people who's seen the fight before and made it into phase 2 a couple of times - the other nights have just been accustoming new people to the fight) but I look forward to the new wings of ICC when they are released, because the first one was pretty damn awesome and I hope it will still feel challenging cause the fights are pretty dynamic.

What was your biggest failure?

Well, I'd like to say failing to kill Yogg, but I think my failure lies at a more personal level. I've gone from bad to worse when it comes to handling social interactions and it's probably going to take me a while to be the person I want to be, especially with the arrival of the new PuG system that you are forced to use every day on all characters (yeah I know, nobody's holding a knife to my throat but still). Jerks, chiefly from other servers, really bring out the bad in me. No good reason to brood on this though, I'm gonna level alts through Outland and hopefully that will bring back some of the fun this game lost recently.

What did you get really, really, really excited about?

I can't really remember anything in particular except our first wipenights in Ulduar-25. Progress raiding is what makes this game great, and wiping and practising and wiping and then finally getting that kill is hard to beat. The downside of this of course is that we went from steady 25 mans to farming Ulduar-10 over the summer, which seriously burnt me out on the game and made me a bit of a jerk towards people I like.

What do you wish you’d done less of?

I think that's pretty established by now...

What was your favorite WoW blog or podcast?

Tam and Chas over at Righteous orbs always write interesting and witty things. It, together with my friends' WoW blogs, are the only ones I really read except news from like wow.com and the likes.

Tell us a valuable WoW lesson you learned in 2009.

Paladin tanking is fucking boring.