In WoW, I have two characters that I play a lot.

There’s my hunter Aralena, the first (and only) character to make it to 80 on my account. Playing Aralena in grouped boss fights is throwing out every shot I have, and then it’s basically a race to see how soon I can hit a button after it comes off cooldown. If I hit my initial abilities in the right order, it all works. On trash pulls, it’s a case of throwing misdirect on the tank and then volleying down anything that blinks. There’s not a great deal of finesse involved and it lets me put out some awesomely awesome numbers in the dps meters while I look around at the scenery.

This is why I prefer playing my resto druid (for haelzor!) Telaru, currently at level 53. The tree thing is fun. Playing Telaru is either very straighforward (rejuv, let it tick out, rejuv, YAWN, imma dance now) or scary as all hell (regrowth rejuv swiftmend ohshit ohshit ohshit nature’s swiftness healing touch CRAAAAAP OSHIT HEAL TRANQUILITY DAMMIT THERE GOES MY 8 MINUTE COOLDOWN), depending on whether the tank is boring (pulls less than 5 mobs at once) or insane (pulls three patrolling mob groups with a healer and a caster in each group). I prefer the second – insane pulls that keep me on my toes and that test my reaction time better than trying to hit something as soon as it comes off cooldown. I like having to think about what button to hit. I like playing a healer, rather than dps. I like the challenge.

Or at least, that’s what I thought until today’s LFG fun and games on Telaru. Turns out that sometimes, if the tank isn’t pulling fast enough, the dps will just go sick and pull stuff all on their own (no, I’ve not been guilty of this yet). When you have a DK tank with twice as many hitpoints than anyone else but still can’t tank multiple mobs and loses threat when someone else sneezes, this is a bad sign. When the pally with only 3K hitpoints decides that he’s going to pull extras because the main tank is going to slow, and then the main tank can’t pick up the aggro, this is an exceptionally bad sign. This is about when I should have left the party and said sayonara, adios, bye-bye.

But, I didn’t. Fool that I am, I remained. I remained through trying to heal three tanks at once. I remained through spamming heals on the squishy who couldn’t do anything without pulling aggro. I remained through the aimless wandering that convinced me, more and more, that our tank had no bloody clue what he was doing. Eventually, 45 minutes into what should have been a twenty minute run, everyone else just… left. It was me, and the tank, and the whistling wind in Blackrock Depths. At that point, I chose to keep hold of my remaining sanity and bugger off. Given my inability to learn from my mistakes, though, I went right back in later with another, equally nuts group.

If you find my marbles, can you please give them back?

There are lots of things I don’t understand. Most of them are in fashion. Read more »

Speed cameras – everyone knows they’re just a shallow attempt to gouge money out of the poor, unsuspecting public, right? We should do away with them, as they serve no practical purpose and don’t really do anything, right? Actually, wrong. And here’s the theory of social contract, with a little grumbling of my own, to explain why. Read more »

In World of Warcraft, I have a lovely druid named Telaru.

This is Telaru. She is a happy dancing cow.

Telaru is a resto cow. She enjoys healing, long walks through the Thousand Needles, and screaming at the tank to pull more than 3 but less than 8 mobs, tyvm. When she heals, she wears a moon on her head, yelling to all who will hear that “if you can’t see the moon, I can’t heal you!” This leads to occasional jokes about the healer mooning people. World of Warcraft is srs bzns.

But what’s this I see? Could it be a GIANT OWLBEAST OF PEWPEWLAZORBEEM BOOMBOOMPEWPEW???

Telaru uses BOOMKIN DANCE! It's super effective!

Today, Telaru got to level 40. She now enjoys healing, screaming at the tank, and nuking the crap out of anything that moves.

For more exciting news about Telaru, you can follow her RSS feed here, or you can follow the combined feed of Telaru and Aralena (my Hunter) here.

The Australian Federal Government has increased the tobacco excise by 25% (yay!) and is also legislating that cigarettes must be sold in new, “plain” packaging stripped of trademarks and pretty colours. The reasoning is that by making cigarettes more expensive, and less pretty, it will be less attractive for people to take it up. If you have a look around in some of the comment threads on news stories, you’ll see that some folks are saying that if we do this to tobacco, we should be doing this to alcoholic drinks as well. You’ll also see folks saying that if we’re not going to do it to alcoholic drinks, we shouldn’t be doing it to smokes as well. Should we be treating them the same? Is tobacco blinding us to another very real danger? What are the stats on Alcohol Vs Tobacco, and their cost to society? Read more »