Shared Topic April 2nd-7th: Who are you?

Whilst watching lord of the rings...again... I got to wondering who I was most like/would be like and who my friends would be.
I decided my hubby would someone like Aragon or faramir - honorable, sincere and all round nice guy. This of course always leads me to think about wow and who would be if I could be and I wondered what everyone thought?
Are you more like Thrall or Jaina? Would you wish to be like Lady Vash'j?

Okay.  This is going to be a little exposing for me.  Because I'm going to write about my truest deepest desires for this Shared Topic and this is not something I believe I broadcast out to people.  I'm sure that most people who have spent any time reading this blog or knowing me for a long time in game might have figured this out,  but I'm not 100% sure.

If I could choose to be anyone, I would choose to be two people.  One would be a nurturing, loving, caring motherly person.  What I would imagine Tiffin Wrynn to be actually.  A sweet, caring, loving person who ultimately dies a tragic, completely avoidable death.  The second would be someone unhinged, insane, basically a sociopath.  So, Sylvanas Windrunner.  This is because I've always felt myself to have two sides.  Even before my bipolar was diagnosed.  I was very interested in Kwan Yin (Buddhist goddess of compassion) and Kali Ma from Hinduism in her Destroyer aspect.  I actually have statues of both of them all over my home.  I have the loving, caring, wants everyone to be okay and healthy side, then I have the nuke them all from orbit and let the Universe sort them out side.

If I had to be 1 entity, it would be the Reliquary of Souls.  This creature has 3 faces, one for suffering, one for pain and one for desire.  Most days, it seems those are the only pieces of me I have.  I desire time with friends and family, touch, kind words and looks.  I have mental suffering that I can't put aside, and as I go through more real life things, the suffering gets worse.  And there is the pain of the past and again, more real life.  And like the Reliquary of Souls, when you kill me, I drop no good loot.  (The good loot doesn't exist!!)  (Also, life is pain Highness, anyone who tells you differently is selling something.)

So there we go.  I like to pretend that I have a good outlook on life.  I don't.  All I see are shades of suffering, pain and desire.  I'm fascinated with death, have been since I was a teenager.  In college, I took death and dying classes so I could learn to understand the grieving process.  This has colored my outlook in ways I can't explain.

So, come to Black Temple.  Bring some buddies.  I'm waiting.

Picture from WoWWiki.

Shared Topic March 19th-25th: Killing Knowledge

The last couple of years in WoW have changed the game quite a bit. While it is very easy to jump into the "elite" vs "casual" vs "noob" bandwagon type of discussion, what is causing it I think is a more interesting topic.
Do you guys think that the LFR and LFD kill the sense of community, but taking it one step further; does it also kill the passing down of knowledge?
I know I did learn a lot from reading the web, but even now I get tons of information from my guild. If I have a doubt, I ask the question and most of the time someone knows off the top of their head where an enchant is, or what the best glyph is, etc. I don't take that community for granted, but it was built before there was a LFD. We are together because we did have to take the trek to the meeting stone. Now we have a button that 1 person uses and BAM we are all there. We know why that is cool, but many of the new players really don't know what that really means.
So are the new tools for grouping killing the knowledge sharing?

I sit here, with a root beer next to me, my cellphone open to Twitter next to me and I think about this shared topic.  Do I think that LFD and LFR have killed the community and knowledge sharing that is out there?  In a short answer, No.  In a long answer, Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.  (Okay, bad joke that I heard from an old rogue friend of mine.)

When I started playing, back in Vanilla, I sucked ass.  I did.  There is no doubt about that.  I looked up to other people, but they were also not the 'elite'.  They played because it was fun to just poke around the world.  The knowledge that was shared to me at that time was simple things like "To use party chat, type /p" and shit like that.

Then, during Burning Crusade, I started raiding and thus became aware of other things.  Like WoW blogs and Thottbot (remember them??) and Allakhazam (remember THEM?).  I fucking thottbot-ed EVERYTHING.  I moved to other guilds and started playing new characters.  In my new guilds, no one played the spec that I wanted so I had to learn on my own.  (Apparently incorrectly, but that's a story I've already told.)  I didn't have that community of people that knew things.

I found Resto4Life.com and fell in love.  I wanted to have Phaelia's little baby druids and I worshiped everything she said.  When she stopped blogging due to her expanding family, I truly mourned but I looked around for other resto druid blogs.  I found elitistjerks during the beginning of Wrath and followed their advice for a while, but eventually carved out my own 'niche' in healing in my guild.

In Wrath, we were a 25 man raiding guild and I believe only had 2, maybe 3, healers when it started.  Between me and my co-healer, my best friend and our resto shaman, we could answer almost every question.  My best friend had a disc priest, the only thing we didn't have was holy pally and we ended up with one of those by the time ICC came about.

However, I was the one people came to with resto druid questions.  If they had healing questions, they would go to either myself or my best friend.  Even people who weren't in our guild would come to us.  It was really weird!!

I never felt that there was a in game 'community' for me to rely on for my questions.  No one played a resto druid when I was starting out or forming my opinions.  I had to search outside the game to get my community.  And oh boy did I find it.

When I made my own blog, BlogAzeroth welcomed me with open arms.  They supported me and let me feel like I was writing TO someone instead of just throwing my thoughts into the nether.  When I decided to become more active in Twitter, I was also welcomed.  I'm very shy (still) but people still respond to me and I have conversations with people all over.  I feel a PART of something.

I'm in a new guild now, one where (for the first time ever) I am healing with another resto druid on a consistent basis.  This was something I never wanted to do.  However, I'm doing it.  I think we have our own healing and gearing ideas but that's okay.  At this point in my healing career, I'm willing to say "Look, I don't heal like you but I'm a goddamn good healer who can keep my shit alive".

I joined the new guild after LFR and LFD were put in.  I still feel a sense of community with them.  They are great people and we fit well together during raids.  I love running randoms with them to meet our weekly guild challenges because they're silly people and fun!

I don't think that advent of LFR and LFD caused a lack of community.  I think the only way it does that is if people only run them alone.  I know my old guild makes a group to go run LFR on Wednesday nights.  I know that my current guild will get 2-6 people together to go run it randomly through out the week.  I love that if we have 4 guildies together, we can pug a 5th from LFD really easily!

Also, in my new guild, we don't have that 1 button that will summon everyone.  We still have 9 levels until we get that, so probably about the time they take that out of the game!!