(If you don’t play WoW, you can skip right over this post, haha.)

Warlock Fun
I have spent the last month focused on my long-abandoned 80 Undead lock. He’s my first and only 80, yet I cast him aside in early 2009 to level some alts and recede from the game a bit as I became more involved in local community antics. In my absence, my sister (rogue) and brother-in-law (DK, mage) got their toons to 80 and well geared, doing all the cool stuff that you can do at that level.

So they were over the moon when my warlock came roaring back in December, coinciding with Patch 3.3, whose LFG overhaul led me on an emblem binge, resulting in my current 2600+ gear score (acc. to Wow-Heroes).

So I’ve been running random heroics each night, learning my class better and steadily rising in the meters. My best DPS so far has been a solid 5400 in Heroic Trial of the Champion. Nothing amazing, I know, but I’m delighted to have progressed so far after having been gone for close to a year. Before I returned last month, I had never run a Heroic. In fact, I had only run a handful of dungeons in the game, mostly the Hellfire Citadel ones. And now I’ve run every single WotLK instance on Heroic.

(My fave? Culling of Stratholme for the dialogue. Or Halls of Reflection because it’s the most challenging thing I’ve done in the game so far.)

Paladin Fun
Before I resumed lock duties in December, I quickly leveled a Draenei paladin to 76 on a different server in the months before. My goal was to use him as a tank and healer upon hitting 80, but I have done neither. In truth, I have never tanked or healed a dungeon with him. I confess to being intimidated by the expectations those roles command of me. With that in mind, I haven’t played him since early December, though I have two really good friends on that server who are probably very annoyed that I haven’t logged on in a while.

So I plan on returning to my pally and at least getting him to 80 soon. From that point forward, it’s a matter of running regular dungeons to get used to tanking or healing before moving into heroics. Having run all the 80 heroics on my lock, I will at least know how the fights go. But doing caster DPS is markedly different from what’s expected as a tank or healer.

So I expect to suck. A lot.

The last time I healed a dungeon was on my 66 priest (Ramps), and I dropped group after wiping 6 times in a row. I was convinced I was the reason, though it could have just been a bad group. Wiping so many times on the same fight (the dragon at the end) is discouraging – especially when you’re the healer – so it wrecked my confidence, and I haven’t played that toon in months.

So that’s pretty much it. I’m loving my warlock and the opportunity to spend more time with my sister and brother-in-law. We often queue up for LFG together (though it takes FOREVER to find a group when you’re queued as DPS triplets) and have a blast racing for the top of the DPS meters.

Zug-zug.

(If you don’t play WoW, but you read all of that – thanks. It’s a supra-nerdy thing to write about, but I love it immensely. I’ve thought about starting a separate WoW blog to indulge all this madness. We’ll see.)