If you’re a regular reader of my blog, this probably won’t come as a surprise. Life has called me to focus on other areas of my life right now. After 4 years of consistent raiding, I stepped down last week in order to spend more time with my children, to blog about our family, and to advocate for my son and his disability.

I find I have fewer and fewer things to say related to World of Warcraft and more and more things to say about my family and our experiences; I am pulled heavily in that direction.

I doubt I’m done for good; these things have a way of circling ’round. For now, though; I’m signing off.

Be kind and play well, my friends.

Here’s a reminder of Sunday’s picture:

And here are the captions!

1. Worgen bear camouflage: be the carpet. (Wade)

2. Bear make-out session! (@dondelorox)

3. Bear is looking for the last dropped easter egg. The draw of chocolate is more powerful than the fear of dead bear carpet. (Andrew)

4. “Where’s the money, Lebowski?”
“It’s down there somewhere, let me have another look.” (Jalindrine)

5. He’s obviously wondering where the rest of the other bear went…..poor thing. (Cassierose)

6. I don’t need Threat Plates to tell me I have aggro! (Ultraking)

Which one is your favorite? You can tell me in the comments below! While you’re there, give me a caption for this week’s screenshot (or send me a mention @battlechicken on Twitter):

]]> http://battlechicken.wordpress.com/2011/05/03/capture-caption-2/feed/ 4 battlechicken capcaption2 http://battlechicken.wordpress.com/2011/05/01/capture-caption/ http://battlechicken.wordpress.com/2011/05/01/capture-caption/#comments Sun, 01 May 2011 23:12:32 +0000 battlechicken http://battlechicken.wordpress.com/?p=1731 Continue reading →]]> Even among the handful of WoW players with whom I exchange screenshots, there are plenty that are funny, awkward, or interesting. I thought it might be fun to do a weekly write-your-own caption post. I’ll provide the screenshot (or you can send me a screenshot by email) and you provide the caption, either through a Twitter mention (@battlechicken) with the tag #capcaption or by commenting below. I’ll post all of the captions I receive!

Don’t worry, if no one’s interested I’ll phase it out quickly and replace it with a fancy dancing bear!

Speaking of bears, the first screenshot is courtesy my husband and his worgen druid, Lycanthropy:

Can someone please tell me what the heck is going on here?!

Somewhere between then and now, peer pressure became much more subtle for me. No one even uses the term “peer pressure” to describe it in reference to adults, but it still very much exists. Feeling forced to bake an extra two dozen cupcakes for the bake sale because Jimmy’s mommy said she was going to? Peer pressure. Feeling bad about ignoring a coworker but doing it anyway because your office buddies think he’s stupid? Peer pressure. Or just ask any parent  you know about the “advice” he or she has been given about parenting over the years. The things we buy and say and do in our lives as adults are influenced by peer pressure every day.

World of Warcraft, at least the social aspects of it, is mostly populated by teenagers and adults, and whether we realize it or not, there is ample peer pressure in the WoW community (if you really don’t believe me, go take a close look at the forums sometime).

I’ve experienced this before and admittedly, I have caved on more than one occasion. There are lots of situations this comes into play, but today I was reminded of a particular circumstance that I have seen happen a dozen times over: the pressure to be a jerk.

Maybe you’re the kind of person who doesn’t care if someone’s DPS is low, and as long as you get through the instance, it’s okay. You might talk about it with your guildies, but unless the person seems open to suggestions, you’re not going to confront him or talk down to him, and unless he’s keeping you from succeeding, you probably wouldn’t be the one to initiate a vote kick for low DPS. Maybe you put him on ignore at the end of the run so you don’t end up in a group with him again, but overall, you leave him alone.

But perhaps you’re running with a group of friends who do make it a habit to berate players they deem “bad” (and sometimes they are bad, that’s the catch). Perhaps they start making snide comments at Low-DPSer until they’re straight-up insulting this person. What do you do if they try to draw you into their bashing? Do you ignore it? Do you tell them to lay off? Do you join in because it’s what’s expected of you? It’s easy to say that you wouldn’t be affected by their opinions, but it just isn’t true–if these are people in your guild or people you know in real life, their opinion is going to stick around you for a long time, and you’re going to make decisions at least partly based on that.

I’ve been in this situation many, many times. I have run with a lot of people who are exceptional players (and some who only think they are), and sometimes they forget that not everyone plays the game for the same reasons we raiders do, and sometimes they’re just full of themselves (or are so self-conscious they need to bully to feel big, just like IRL). Whatever the cause, it’s pretty easy for one or two people in a group to start a downward spiral of insults against another player who doesn’t meet their personal qualifications (protip: if you are this person, please run with guild groups and save us all the hassle of watching you be a butthead).

At the end of the run, what have you accomplished by joining in an unfriendly roast? Maybe you’ve gotten some kind of WoW street cred with your guildies, but if they’re the type to start this in the first place, their friendship is most likely fickle and definitely not worth the maintenance cost. Most likely, you’ve just made another player log off in disgust, swear off of tanking forever, or spec away from healing. Even if you haven’t affected them in that way, at the very least you made it to their ignore list. Congratulations?

It’s cheesy, it’s preachy, it’s childish, but it’s true: stay above the influence. Think for yourself. Stand out in the crowd as a leader, not a follower. Your bully buddies aren’t the only ones watching your actions and judging you on them. Your officers are watching, your class lead is watching, future guildies (or not) are watching–and so are the rest of us.

Set the tone. Greet your fellow PuGgers when they join the group. Take responsibility for the things you’ve done wrong. Be humorous, be friendly, be forgiving. It goes further than you know.

Play well, friends.

An Explanation

How long has it been since my last blog post? A month, 2? I don’t even know without looking. The reasons are fairly straightforward: 1) I haven’t had anything to write about, and 2) I haven’t had time to write about nothing. That is, there’s nothing I felt led to write about when it concerns WoW (at least, nothing that would be appropriate in a public forum), and I haven’t had time to come up with neat in-between ideas.

Back in November, I let you have a peek inside my life away from WoW as I detailed the diagnosis experience of my autistic son. I mentioned in that post that he would begin receiving intensive therapy, and boy, has he ever! We are now in the midst of ABA (Applied Behavior Analysis) Therapy at the hefty time block of 20 hours per week. It has been nothing short of absolutely wonderful for him (and me).

While I can’t always be in the room with him while he’s in therapy, I don’t feel comfortable devoting my full attention to blogging when I could be paying attention to what’s going on with him, and I don’t want to write crappy blogs, either (it’s okay if you think my usual posts are crappy, I won’t take it personally). Further, when therapy ends for the day and my son takes his nap, I’m itching to play, not write. Things are starting to get back to a more natural rhythm now that we’re getting used to our schedule changes, but I still haven’t had any in-game experiences that would prompt me to blog. That is not an invitation to drama, I swear.

Why do I feel like I just jinxed myself?

An Adjustment

Many of the people who read more than just N2B are familiar (enough) with my family either from spending time with me in-game or through Twitter. Particularly, many of you know my husband Ultraking. After a few days of thought and processing, he has decided to step down from raiding to spend more time with our children since he works so much right now. I am so proud of him for going with his gut on this.

I haven’t come to the same decision yet, and will continue to raid unless we decide that we can’t handle being a one-raider couple. It’s going to be an adjustment for both of us, but at least I have fewer people to roll against? (weak laughter).

A Patch

Hey! It’s Patch Day! I thought about writing about Patch 4.1 before we actually ran right into it, but the truth is, I’m not that shaken up by any of the changes.

He just heard about the nerf to Starsurge.

That’s not entirely true. The nerf to Starsurge made me weep big, drippy moonkin tears. I do know what it did in PvP (I think considering our survivability, more burst was a fair trade, but what do I know?), but I also know that a flat out nerf without a balancing buff seems a little harsh to those of us who are more concerned with killing bosses than players. I’m hoping that there are going to be tweaks coming as they see what happens now that it’s going live.

Other than that, everything else I either have neutral-ish feelings about, or I downright like them. I like idea of the new 5-man content, I think the change to ground AoE’s to be distinguishable between friendly and enemy players is a great idea, I am thrilled about being able to rez easily after someone has released (without using Mass Rez), and of course, the Stampeding Roar buff is going to make me recover from wipes a lot more easily (so I can forget to cast Mark that much sooner)!

The first thing I’m going to do when I log on? Probably jump in a group for the new 5-mans. Maybe consider trading in Justice Points for Honor (maybe not) or buying Maelstrom Crystals with them to improve some of my enchants. Troll land, here I come!

Something Completely Different

Congratulations to my guild, <Ephemera> of Durotan, for achieving Realm First! Guild Level 25. That was some serious heroic-running, the likes of which I have never seen; it was a total blast! Great job, guys!

Enter Cataclysm, and the whole idea of healing made me a little nauseas. I heard what all the healers were saying, and I knew there was going to be an adjustment. With that in mind, I just shuffled Resto out of the way for a while. The re-introduction to healing came slowly, starting with the last boss in a heroic run and progressing to Baradin Hold and then to filling in for our 25-man raids, mostly on non-progression bosses.

With our 25-man raid now broken into two groups of 10, hybrids once again earn their stripes by being able to fill multiple roles as needed; and boy, did I ever earn my hybrid stripes last night! Here are three of the things I realized last night while doing a fairly poor job of healing through Atramedes.

1) There’s something to be said for being thrust from your comfort zone. For years I knew nothing but healing in raids. When I switched to dps, it was almost like learning a whole new game: new things to understand and pay attention to and new people to impress. I wasn’t a great dpser for a while, and last night, I wasn’t a good healer. This was our second time seeing this boss, and I had previously dpsed with a different composition. Not only were we learning the fight with this new setup, I was 100% off-balance (ha! Unintentional, but I’m leaving it). The struggle to do everything I needed to do as well as I possibly could was a humbling reminder to stay on top of my game. Feeling complacent? Don’t be afraid to try a new spec or roll a character to fill a different role. I’m amazed by the things I learn by forcing myself into a completely different perspective.

2) Healers can’t always catch you when you…fail. I know from experience how easy it is to tell yourself: “It’s not that much damage; I can take it and the healers will heal me. It’s the healer’s job!” Sort of. It’s the healer’s job to keep you healed up through unavoidable damage. Of course we all make mistakes sometimes, and healers are awesome at covering our butts. But you should never assume that a healer can save you if you stand in something dangerous or do something that will put you in jeopardy. Thankfully, our group is awesome at both correcting mistakes and being honest and gracious about having made them, and no one was being intentionally negligent. Still, my hands were full enough with healing everyone through Sonic Breath and Searing Flame, and when raiders occasionally dropped the proverbial ball, there weren’t always enough hands open to catch it. The number one rule of raiding has always been: stay alive. You are just as responsible for your health as your healer is.

In this scenario, the couple is Atramedes and the thirsty dude is an AWESOME raider!

3) Healing is less predictable than dps. I should disclaimer this with: or at least it is when you’re not used to healing. I realized last night that I have a pretty firm grip on boss fights when I’m balance. After a few attempts, I know what to expect. I’m usually completely comfortable with my rotation and my normal way of doing things, so following my pattern of dps while dodging such-and-such that’s on a timer is pretty easy. I can glance at my NeedtoKnow bars and decide what my next step is at my convenience. Moonfire about to fall off? Starsurge coming off cooldown? About to hit an Eclipse? With a split second look, the little Tetris pieces in my head fall into place, and my next several steps are laid out for me, especially if you combine that familiarity with fight experience and DBM timers.

Not so with healing! I can make some reasonable predictions: The raid’s going to take a hit after Sonic Breath; the mage pinging gongs during Searing Flame is going to need a HoT. But just as often I’m not expecting random raider A to suddenly drop to 10% of his health, or random raider B to suddenly be out of range. In the past, it wasn’t uncommon for druids (or at least this druid) to keep HoTs up on at least the people who were expected to take damage, and sometimes this meant a whole group or practically the whole raid. I couldn’t possibly do that now, at least in my current gear, and expect my mana to last through the fight, so I feel like I’m reactive healing a lot more than the preemptive healing I was accustomed to. I have a much deeper respect for my healers after last night than I have lately. Thank you, healers; we love you!

We did kill him despite my shortcomings last night, and I found it refreshing to do something different. I guess the TL;DR of this would be: 1) Try something new, 2) Keep yourself alive, and 3) Appreciate your healers!

Raid well, my friends.

To commemorate this occasion last year, I posted blog stats (I know you can hardly contain your excitement, but try for me). But as I’ve scrolled through this year’s posts, I realized something: I post a LOT of pictures. I knew this; it’s not unintentional. When I’m reading blogs, I like chunks of text broken up by images (it’s the toddler in me). But I don’t think I realized the extent of my addiction.

So here, to review the past two years, a collection of images that appeared on my blog:

Hello, My Name is Ambermist – February 23, 2009

Preview of Ignis in Ulduar – March 17, 2009

New Druid Form?!?!?!?! – March 31, 2009

Ambermist & Ultraking Forever – April 3, 2009

On Pins & Needles – April 13, 2009

Heroic Ulduar: Kologar – May 21, 2009

A Short Tale About An Old God – June 25, 2009

Blizzcon & One Hot Nelf – August 21, 2009

5 Ways to Get /Ignored – November 20, 2009

A Cord of Two Strands: Part 7 – December 20, 2009

The Plagueworks: Professor Putricide – February 4, 2010

When It’s Time to Change – April 1, 2010

Behind the Chicken – November 18, 2010

…And Keep Moving On – October 18, 2010

Azeroth: Before & After – November 25, 2010

Like a Ninja – February 24, 2010

Thanks for letting me make a home in my little corner of the blogosphere for the past 2 years. As a whole, the WoW blog community rocks, and I sure am glad to be a part of it!

1. It’s harder to get 25 people together in the same place at the same time.
2. 25 raiders means there are more opportunities for someone to fail.
3. It takes longer to get 25 people on the same page (this was stated in the comments much more clearly than I said it in my post; thank you Emmalise, for describing the collective aha! moment!)

Some of the more aggressive people on either side of the 10- and 25-man issue would use this either to attack: “25′s don’t take any additional skill; it’s just people-wrangling;” or defend: “25-mans are harder for lots of reasons, and you’re just trying to make excuses why you can’t do it.”  (Yes, I actually have heard both of those come from real players). The point I’m making is that yes, 25-mans are harder, and yes, largely because there is some “people-wrangling” involved, but that doesn’t make that aspect of it wrong or right–it’s still just a matter of preference. [Insert diatribe about learning to respectfully disagree here.]

So if it’s not an issue of right and wrong, and it’s all about preference, shouldn’t the ability to choose between 10- and 25-man raids without being penalized for picking 10-mans be awesome? In theory, yes. I think raiders should absolutely be able to choose between 10- and 25-man raids based on what suits their motivation for raiding. Unfortunately, theories tend to be difficult to pull off in practice, and the problem with pulling this one off is, as I said at the end of my last post, that choosing to do a 25-man raid is becoming more and more difficult.

Previously, if you wanted to be taken seriously in overall progression, you were expected to do 25-mans. 10-mans were in their own sort of bracket, which actually would be perfect IF there wasn’t such a stigma attached, and in Wrath, there absolutely was a feeling of 10-mans being “lesser progression” in guilds that were unable to successfully complete 25-mans, although I hardly thing that should be the case.

Those who wanted to be taken seriously in progression raided in 25-mans, and even though they hated waiting for the people who were slower to learn or just bad performers to step up and execute boss fights correctly, they accepted that if they wanted the shiny(er) epics and they wanted to be able to boast about their raiding progression, they would have to put up with it. If not handled well by a guild’s leadership, this could lead to some serious burnout. This was the problem of Wrath: this dynamic coupled with months and months (and months) of the same content caused widespread burnout among raiders.

Enter Cataclysm, and we run into a new problem: the slow decline of 25-mans. I’m not sure how true this next statement is, but it seems reasonable that this decline has started mostly on servers not well-known for their progression because the pool of competitive raiders is smaller, and the raiders in the above scenario, who do everything right and want to progress and are tired of waiting for the stragglers suddenly have a new option: 10-man progression.

With the achievements and the gear being identical regardless of which type of raid you run, there’s much less stigma attached to 10-man guilds, and running with a smaller roster means you have very detailed control over who’s in and who isn’t. You don’t have to put up with players who don’t perform up to your standards if you really don’t want to. You don’t have to take anyone just to fill up your raid; if you want to be picky, there’s room to do that, whereas a 25-man raid on a server with fewer committed raiders often finds itself taking people who either aren’t as good or aren’t as committed just to have enough people to raid.

Understandably, the people who suffered from burn out last time either went straight into 10-mans this time or have found themselves having much less patience as their 25-man raids start hitting the wall.

As those in this second group realize that the 10-man option is available, this leaves them in a place to take one of two steps: either they can leave their guild and find a 10-man raid group, or they can try to push their guild to either improve or move to a 10-man format. When you go to your guild master or raid leader, who is no doubt as frustrated as you are, and say, “I’m sick of this. Why am I trying so hard when these people aren’t? We really need to do something about this, or I’m going to have to go somewhere else and raid,” you put your leadership in a tough predicament.

Maybe they’ll try first to help the poor players improve, but you can only do so much–part of raiding is individual accountability. When that doesn’t work well enough, perhaps they’ll try to recruit and phase out the people who still aren’t performing. This might actually work, but if you’re on a server with a low raider base and an even lower rate of raider transfers, it might be difficult if not downright impossible to find raiders who fit what you’re looking for.

The next step is to consider 10-man progression, but then there’s a whole host of questions that come with that: one 10-man, or two? If we opt for one, what will the people who aren’t invited to the 10-man do? If we opt for two, will we end up with an A-team/B-team dynamic, and do we want that?  (From where I sit as a raider, two 10-mans will always lead to an A/B team type situation, so you might as well be upfront about it). If your guild decides to stay 25-man and try to cover for the weaker players, those people who originally came to your raid leader and said they were sick of it will leave, and often; these people are some of your best performers. If your guild goes 10-man, there are going to be people who are left out and feel that distinctly enough to leave. This is not a good situation for a guild to be in, but it is one that’s appearing more and more often.

Once a guild chooses to go to a 10-man format and chooses its raiders, those who either aren’t interested in 10-mans or have been left out of the groups are going to move on, especially the good ones who just couldn’t be fit into the roster for one reason or another. And if these people leave, there’s likely to be a transfer to a server where 25-mans are running more consistently, depleting the original server’s raider pool even more.

According to WoWProgress.com, there are now only 7 guilds on my server who have stepped into 25-mans at all, and one of them (my guild) just became a 10-man guild. Of those 7, only two have progressed beyond 6 boss kills. The 10-man progression list, on the other hand, has 17 guilds who are at 6 boss kills or above.

I don’t know what the solution to this is, but even if there is one, it’s probably too late to implement it, at least for this raiding tier. And perhaps there just aren’t enough people out there who think a solution is necessary to warrant figuring one out. I don’t really know what’s coming next for me in my guild situation, either; the next month or so will determine that. What I do know is that the WoW raiding scene is changing, and I feel like I’ve lost my place in it. A lot of us saw this coming when the announcements were made; we just weren’t sure what form it would take.

25-mans, at least on some servers, are dying; and I don’t think there’s any shame in saying: “we told you so.”

"Trade Chat" by Neko-samma

For the next several months, the discussion about the two popped up in a lot of places: my guild forums, the official forums, Twitter, blogs; heck, even Trade chat took a break from linking things inappropriately to talk about the change. Some people were really heated on one side or the other (which I think is pretty silly; it’s not about which one is better, it’s a matter of preference and opinion), while some didn’t care. Most sat in the middle, reserving their full opinion for when we actually saw how this would work out exactly.

Well, I’ve seen it. And my opinion remains unchanged.

I prefer 25-man raids. People tend to say, “The only thing that makes 25-mans harder than 10-mans is organizing it all.” That’s neither true nor false; it’s just an incomplete picture.

Yes, 25-mans are harder to organize. It is a million times easier to organize a 10-man if that’s your plan from the beginning. Finding 10-15 semi-reliable people who can make up a pretty decent composition is a cake walk for an experienced raid leader, and not too complicated for an inexperienced one, either. Wipe recovery takes less time because there are fewer people to recover, and having one hybrid dps/healer in your raid makes it a versatile environment for moving through bosses with different mechanics. Getting 25 people together at the same time and keeping them invested in a raid for a few hours is certainly a challenge.

But there’s so much more to it than that. The reason 25-mans are harder, all raid-forming considerations aside, is because there are 25 people. No, I’m not being stupid; follow along with me. In a 10-man raid, if one person fails to perform either in the meters or in raid awareness, it’s darn easy to spot: they’ll be the one whose dps is consistently holding you back during burn fights, or whose target continually dies, or whose mobs always go awry. Out of 10 people, one bad egg is going to shine like a glowing, shimmering Star of Fail.

In a 25-man, that person isn’t necessarily going to stand out as being consistently bad unless they’re either really dreadful or you’ve been alerted to the issue. You could have someone who is inconsistent in their performance but does just enough better than a couple of other people to keep their inconsistency hidden for a while.

This matters because having 25 people also means that there are more opportunities to wipe. This seems common sense, but really think about it for a minute: if you have 10 people, there are only 10 people who can wipe you. Even if you can only get 7 or 8 solid, consistent people in your raid, the odds are in your favor. In a 25-man, however; you’re going to reasonably have more lower- to marginally-performing raiders, so the pool of likely wipers goes from 2-3 to 5-6, not counting bad luck or a moment of indiscretion from one of your good raiders. Even if Blizzard really has tuned every raid to be the same level of mechanical difficulty for both raids, I think they are hard pressed to account for this difference.

If a 10-man raid and a 25-man raid go up against the same boss with relatively the same ratio of good to mediocre players (and luck not included), I think it’s fair to believe the 25-man will wipe more times than the 10-man raid in conquering that boss. Here’s the kicker: I don’t have any problem with that. For me, that level of difficulty is what makes raiding a challenge, and therefore, makes boss kills feel like achievements.

I know everyone doesn’t share that opinion, and I wouldn’t expect them to. Some people hate that aspect of 25-man raids, and for them, 10-mans are certainly the way to go. It doesn’t make them less accomplished in my eyes; they just like different aspects of raiding than I do, and I think having a choice to raid the way you want to is phenomenal.

However, while I’m not ready to say 25-mans are dead (not by a long shot; I know lots of 25-man guilds who are raiding and succeeding!), the ability to choose to raid in a 25-man setting is getting harder. This post is already longer than I intended, though; so I’m going to slap a part 1 sticker on it and explain why I say that tomorrow.

Continue on to I Told You So: The Decay of 25-mans, Part 2.

I don’t have any problem admitting that I’m a big softy (insert moonkin joke here!), and yes, there have been moments as I journeyed through the World of  Warcraft that brought tears to my eyes. Having battle rezzed the Five, here five WoW moments that moved me:

WoWWiki User Zima Stonehammer saves Sharpbeak.

1. Saving Sharpbeak (The Hinterlands). I did this quest while leveling Ambermist back in the day. It was pre-BC, so my husband dragged his level 60 mage out to help me through Jintha’Alor. I did not expect Sharpbeak to tug at my heartstrings the way he did when I saw him in that cage, and I “aww”-ed hardcore. Then UK said, “Oh, you’re going to like this, turn your camera around and look over there.” As Sharpbeak–rescued, reunited, and happy–flew off into the sunset, tears welled up. It was a good moment. Note: According to Wowhead & WoWWiki, this quest is no longer available, but you can still see Sharpbeak (now a mature gryphon!) helping the Wildhammers in the Hinterlands.

2. Peace at Last (Starts with Tabetha’s Assistance in Dustwallow Marsh). Although for many of us these quest became tedium (to the point that I took one look at Dustwallow and high-tailed it while leveling my hunter), the first time you experience this chain all the way through is pretty special. The first time I completed the entire chain–scouting the Inn right up to visiting the grave–I was leveling my paladin. After that, I take a moment to give Jim a hug every time I see him; I understand why he is where he is in his life now, and I can’t entirely blame him.

My paladin, Nessia, kneeling in respect before the deceased Hyal family.

Pamela Redpath (from WoWPedia)

3. Pamela Redpath (Eastern Plaguelands). I didn’t do Eastern Plaguelands much on Ambermist. I ran in there with a group of guildies at the time, and they rushed us around the zone without stopping to experience it (yet another reason I prefer to quest solo). When I finally went back and completed some of these quests on other characters, I was awed to find so much depth in their stories. I just did the new Pamela Redpath quests (similar to the old ones, just less spread out), and I was struck again by how bittersweet it is when you leave her there to go assure Carlin that she’s okay. “You’ll keep the bad guys away, right?” I wanted to, so much. And when you finally return to her having completed the quest–well, that moment is hug-worthy.

4. The Wrathgate (Dragonblight–Quest Progression). Interestingly enough, I actually saw the cut scene before I ever even saw Dragonblight, but without context it was just a really cool scene. Once I played through it and saw what happened there and really understood it, I couldn’t help but cry. Putriss was exceptionally chilling, and watching Saurfang and Bolvar fall before the cleansing fire of the red dragonflight reached them was epically moving for me.

I have this letter in my bank, and it will stay there forever.

5. My Letter from Tyrande. When I finished Loremaster, I was elated. The achievement was a big accomplishment for me. I knew that it came with a tabard, and flew to the nearest mailbox (which happened to be at Telaar in Nagrand) and picked it up. I did not expect to find a letter from Tyrande addressing me as “Loremaster.” For a moment, I identified with my character–this was achievement, recognition, appreciation, and pride. And it was awesome.