On Work, Play, and Submarines

The vacation is over. And by "vacation", I mean "time not spent at my job".

Since the beginning of January, I've been attending a work-related course at one of the local technical colleges. That meant I was home every night. THAT meant I could get my WoW on with more frequency!

Naturally my wife loved that. She's sweet.

In that time, what did I manage to accomplish?

- Geared my three 80s in various quantities of T9 gear, courtesy of the LFD system.

- Slapped some heirloom items on alts and levelled them up a little.

- Swapped professions on a few characters and powerleveled them up.

- Made and lost (see previous comment) copious amounts of gold.

Not a single character has set foot in a raid. Not yet, probably not ever. Or at least, not in the forseeable future. You see, now that my course is over I must return to the glorious workforce. That means spending most of the week out of town. Back in the fall, I took a laptop with me and in those cold, lonely evenings I would log into World of Warcraft on an Internet connection that felt like the equivalent of strapping the signal on the back of a carrier pigeon.

Seriously. I would get disconnects if I even thought about scanning the Auction House. I would be half through combat before my character started moving. I didn't even think about running the Argent Tournament dailies. It was that bad.

Over the holidays, there was a bit of a computer mishap. As a result, the laptop must now stay in the City while I travel to the Country to work. I am curious to discover how long it takes before I start twitching. Seeing as how I haven't logged on very often over the course of the weekend, I'm not sure I'll miss it very much.

I wouldn't say I've hit the wall. There's still plenty that I can do, and I'm not even on a Raid team. I did try my hand at tanking on my baby Druid. I loaded him up with Heirloom items, read a few blogs so I knew what to do, then queued up as a tank.

As someone who has run LFD's as three separate DPS classes, it's ridiculous how fast tanks get groups. It's also funny to watch baby DPS classes act the total fool. I ran two groups back to back, and in both cases we had wipes because everybody that could do damage, immediately targeted the nearest mob and started unloading on it. They didn't try to pull it, they tried to solo it.

Well and good until they see they've just pulled three mobs each.

By the time I rounded them up, there were usually a few people dead (including myself at times). After that, they had the nerve to ask where the healer was.

Uh, he was doing his job - keeping the tank alive.

Anyway, with that out of the way for the time being, I'm back to the Real Life grind. Maybe during the time away I'll be able to sneak onto a computer somewhere and round up some ideas for blog content. I was going to put something together regarding the Authenticator-protected account getting hacked, but it hasn't generated the widespread chaos I expected. In fact, it's been addressed (at least, as good as it can be).

Until later in the week, here's something for you to chew on - If you thought Bear Tanks with freakin' rockets strapped to their butts was funny, wait until Cataclysm drops and you can go down on... submarines!