Sheeps up!

So I know I missed Saturday’s blog. I figured since it was Christmas Day and I would have pretty good excuse. I was busy. Holidays are crazy for grown up (well grown upish) women. I was cooking and cleaning and putting on earrings. Oh yeah I had a broken kitchen faucet for all of this too.  I had a fabulous Christmas Eve and Day and it was totally worth it. Thank you Welch and Walker families for having me and making it great. Anyway, time for business.

So I have a plethora of level 80 characters because Wrath of the Lich King was the alt expansion pack. (Alts are characters that you play that are not the character you focus most of your attention on or raid with. That toon, character, is called a main.) Everyone leveled seventy billion alts to max level with varying degrees of skill. I had planned to level my hunter or shadow priest to 85 first after my druid until I started running heroics and realized what mages are like at 85.  Yesterday my mage hit 85 and it is flipping cool.

A bit of back ground is in order here. I started this game playing my mage. I played all of original WoW and half of Burning Crusade with her as my main.  Mages are a damage class that also has some pretty good crowd control and they make free food and water for their groups. I was really good at crowd control and being a vending machine and sheeper but I was pretty bad at damage. In Wrath of the Lich King crowd control became irrelevant almost immediately and soon so did being a vending machine and I lost the two things I was good at with my mage. Hodareynn, my mage, went into a box and I only played her when I needed something mined, cooked, or fished up.

I started running instances in Cataclysm on my druid and I grouped with some good mages and some bad mages. The good mages made me realize how awesome I could be on Hod again.  Our crowd control, referred to as sheep even though very few mages’ polymorph spell take the form of sheep anymore, is useful again. I love sheeping. I don’t know why. We got some cool new spells like frost ring which turns all enemies that enter it into blocks of ice and flame orb.  Hod is out of the box.

I ran my first instances on her last night. The first one went really well. I had a great group with a tank that used my sheep and knew what they were doing. I loved it. I was a sheep machine. I would turn an enemy into a monkey and it would stay that way until the tank popped it. Beautiful. I did pretty good damage too. Then I ran a second instance.

Sometimes you run instances that are so bad that you just have to write about them. I was lucky in one respect, they were so bad that I knew beyond a doubt that our fail was not just because I was playing my mage poorly. We had a new tree druid healer and he hadn’t quite figured out the new healing so he was struggling big time.  Our tank would mark crowd control targets but he would mark the wrong things. In instances you want to crowd control the enemies that shoot magic from a distance. This tank was marking crowd control on the enemies that would run to the tank and hit them. To top it off, we had a damage paladin who would run in front of the group and pull groups then hit the crowd controlled targets repeatedly so we couldn’t cc them again.  I spent the entire run trying to save the healer. My damage sucked and my sheeps never stayed sheeped. Atleast I was a good vending machine.