In keeping with our theme from yesterday

The video for lord Rhyolith still hasn't had a successful upload. I'll get it one of these nights! It would probably help if I got the size down a bit more though - I'm amazed at how large video files are.

Also apropos to the theme from yesterday, I've got a couple short stories from the RDF and even a tiny one from trade. The first story is from Selinah, my gathering alt and tank. The further we progress into the Firelands, the easier it is to cap my main on VP, so I get a chance to heal or tank every so often. Last night after work, I thought it might be fun to pick up a satchel especially because tanks get instant queues.

I zoned in to a fresh ZA and we started up. Someone facepulled the little group of mobs right before the start of the gauntlet just as I ran up to the scout, so I got to tank a few extra adds and what have you, but it went fine. One of the DPS died on Akil'zon, but I didn't see where it happened and assumed that they'd stood in the lightning storm.

Then, as I was preparing to head off in the direction of Nalorakk, the healer says "Tank. You take too much damage."

I was pretty flabbergasted - it's not as if Akil'zon does a lot of tank damage, he's one of the party damage bosses. Further, I've tanked ZA and ZG several times, occasionally with somewhat undergeared healers. I use my cooldowns and debuff the bosses, and unless I stand in fire or something, I'm never really the point of failure.

There's this funny thing that happens in RDF parties though, where whoever first calls someone else bad tends to get others to agree with them. So if I'd called the healer a bad for letting someone die - even if that person had stood in the lightning storm - things probably would have gone differently.

I suggested that maybe if tank damage was an issue for him, he should consider using healing touch, but he was adamant that lifebloom should be able to heal 100% of the damage in an encounter.

Now for reference, here's the armory of the healer in question: Tankshifter of Silvermoon.

What happened last night was that, still flabbergasted, I said "uh, I've tanked this entire place multiple times and my gear is obviously sufficient. Maybe you should cast HT. But if you're TOTALLY CONVINCED of yourself, votekick me I guess?" And they did. And the healer apparently got some sort of tank to carry him, and probably lied about how I was bad.

In retrospect, I wish I'd been bitchier.

I wish I'd inspected him and said "oh look, someone with unenchanted pvp gear and welfare epix wants to get carried by an overgeared tank."

To the DPS that chimed in with him, I wish I'd said "maybe if your DPS wasn't so hilariously awful, Akil'zon wouldn't have taken so long and run our terrible healer OOM."

I wish I'd said "I'm obviously wearing enough gear for the content and I use my cooldowns, which means that if you can't heal me you're just bad."

I wish I'd said that healing through Nefarian after he'd been nerfed six feet under the ground didn't mean you were anything better than mediocre.

The group still would have kicked me, probably, and the healer especially would still have thought he was right... but I'd've felt better.

That said, my re-queue got me into a ZG group which ended up being fun. We got two DPS that had never been to the instance before, so I gave them quick tips on everything. The first couple healers saw that we had two new DPS and bailed, but the third healer, who was wearing T12 (Paladin T12 hat + shoulders look SO COOL) and was clearly only there for VP, stuck with us, even killing some of the quest mobs.

All of the DPS - all of them - died on the Zanzil encounter, chewed up by the berserker that I'd told them to kill (even melee, DPS in general was loooow and there was no way we'd be zerging Zanzil down without killing the zerker), and the healer and myself whittled down the last 40% or so of Zanzil's health ourselves.

I used all my cooldowns multiple times, used darkflight three times and intervene even more often to keep myself away from the berserker, and the paladin used holy's perpetual sprints to keep away from it. It was glorious.

We had to reset Jin'do once because I guess they thought I was kidding when I said "stand in the green on phase 1", but the second pull was successful (if hilarious). We actually broke the shields on all three chains before the first chain had died. I had never seen that happen before - a platform full of twisted spirits, none of the chains shielded, and no berserker up nor any reason to have one. So I spent a lot of time stunning and killing spirits and generally keeping them off of the healer and DPS. It was probably the longest Jin'do encounter I've ever seen, just like Man'dokir with that group was the longest I've seen it go on and actually result in a kill.

At the end of it, though, I'd had a lot of fun. More fun than I've had in any of a number of fast and smooth yet mute RDF runs.

Also I won the barrel from Gub and it was full of Sagefish. Yay!

Finally, this afternoon when I was on briefly before work to take care of some stuff and check auctions, trade chat had a little series of questions. There was one guy that was asking if the int heirlooms were for casters and the agi ones were for phys DPS. And it wasn't even that he was asking that general question, but he would link each individual set and then go "is this for casters?"

And, you know, yes. It is. But once that you've established that int is for casters, why do you need to ask individually for the cloth, leather, and mail heirlooms?

Another person had a very basic question about how to play their spec, and I remarked that the official forums typically have a well-maintained stickied guide thread for any given spec, and it would be faster and less prone to error to read that.

Some people in trade thought I was being rude, but I really don't think I was. I wasn't being insulting or mean about it - just letting people know that there are easier resources than asking trade, which often has 32 different flavors of the wrong answer for any given question due to a combination of people being mistaken and being trolls.

Sadly, even those people that make it to the forums don't necessarily read the stickies. Most days, there are 2-3 new threads posted to the hunter forum that say "how do I play Marksmanship?"

Now, I'm all for people asking that question and coming to the forums for help with it. But there stickied threads right at the top of the forum that are clearly guides for how to play MM and SV post-4.1.

I'd be fine with someone posting a thread that said "I read the stickies and didn't understand this particular part..." or "So in the sticky it said this thing about 4.1, but is that still true in 4.2?" or "the guide doesn't make any recommendations for how to do a fight like Beth'tilac, can anyone give me advice on that boss?" But no one does that! They show up in the forum, don't read the stickies, and then want people to re-type all of it just for them.

Why does this happen? I don't get it.