On the Move with Lani

Before I go on, here is my standard World of Warcraft warning if you don't play WoW or you aren't familiar with the joys of a massively multi-player online role-playing game environment:

"Blah GINGER, blah blah blah blah, GINGER, blah blah blah blah GINGER, blah blah."

OK with that out of the way...

I'm in casual raiding guild. We have more than enough to field a 10-man raid, but not enough interest for a 25-man. We've got enough for a 25-man but people aren't interested, I guess.

I really like the people in the guild so I don't want to move to a more hardcore guild, because for me this is supposed to be fun, not a second job.

A "raid" in this case is a special dungeon full of big bad monsters that have special abilities... think of 10 people who are like the Power Rangers, I guess is the most simplistic way you can think about it. Obviously there's so much more to it, but I won't bother going into the mechanics of a raid (but here's a link if you're interested).

I currently have FIVE level 70 characters. That's a LOT. And I'm not like some people who just power-level up their characters and then move onto a new character the moment they hit 70. A few of my 70s have some real solid time put into them, including my primary avatar, a healing priest. Aside from leveling your character from 1 to 70, you can improve your character by obtaining better weapons and armor, which "drop" off of difficult monsters (you know, the ones that take 10 people an hour to kill--and then he drops ONE item...with a group of 10 people who have 16 armor pieces to fill, you do the math).

I'd like to think I'm a really good player. I'm not perfect, and I'm not even remotely close to being the best. But I listen, pay attention, and do my homework for the most part, because if we're going into a new dungeon for the first time, we need to read various online guides written by people who've progressed faster than us and who put together information on how to fight the monsters. Does the monster have the ability to stun players? Mind control players to turn against other players? Turn you into a little frog while you are fighting? You need to know all this because it changes the way you fight them. Again, a very simplistic description, but you get the picture.

Well our little casual raiding guild spent nine months in Karazhan, the 10-man dungeon that was the "starter raid" with WoW's Burning Crusade expansion set that hit the market a year ago. We never went beyond that (and there's a lot of 25-man raiding content in the new expansion) because well, like I said, we're casual. But 9 months of the same dungeon, twice a week, gets really really boring, especially when you've been diligently attending all that time.

So we were really excited to move onto the newer 10-man raid that they recently introduced in a software patch, called Zul'Aman.

Last night was our third visit into ZA, and the second time we actually managed to down two of the bosses (monsters) in quick enough succession that we actually found ourselves with some time left over at the end of the evening. That's as far as we'd gotten before, and it turns out NOBODY had done their homework to find out how to fight, much less get to, the three other bosses in there.

So we're running around poking our heads, and some folks have a browser window open trying to read the how-to guides on the fly. It was pretty hilarious... but it wound up wasting a good half an hour of our time, and we ran out of time to kill the third boss.

So kids, let this be a lesson. Even if you are just playing computer games, you still need to do your homework and do your research!