Repeated conversation before I hit 80, but after I got tired of Nick asking me every 10 minutes if I was 80 yet:
Nick: Are you 80 yet?
Me: Yes.
Nick: Great! Come run a heroic with me?
Me: Can’t, have to hit 80.
Nick: …
Repeated conversation after I hit 80:
Nick: Come run a heroic!
Nick & I have very, very different playstyles. He’s pretty much solely interested in end-game instances. I like questing & the lore & the story that goes with it. So, while he races to the top as fast as humanly possible and only does things that will give him more gear so that he can do bigger & better things, I tend to … meander a little. (Although, I was still second in our guild to hit 80. Of course, four of our other main guildies had an engineered slowdown so they could all play & level together… and they started hitting 80 yesterday, too.)
Anyway, so now I can run heroics. Sort of. We started with Utgarde Keep, which on non-heroic is one of the first dungeons you do in Northrend. On heroic, it’s not much harder. Awesome.
Then we ran the heroic daily, Gundrak. Gundrak can lick my left testicle.
I have a very old computer. My laptop is currently dead in the water, so I’ve been using my old desktop. The one that was generally only good for watching downloaded tv shows while I played warcraft on my laptop. The one that I bought when I first started working at my current place of employment. In early 2003. I’ve replaced the video card once since then, and it was a decent system at the time, but now? It’s old.
Ground effects are the worst for me. I’ve got all of my video settings turned alllll the way down, save for a little bit of spell effects because with them turned off, you can’t see ANY ground effects, which is a good way to die. Except having them turned so that I can see them doesn’t seem to help. There’s one boss who spits purple goo at you. Purple goo does a pretty hefty amount of damage every second. No problem, step out of goo.
Catch: The ground effect from the purple goo makes my computer start weeping tears of shame. Taking a step out of the goo takes 3-4 seconds, which knocks me down a good 4-5k health. I should be taking 1.5k at most. Plus, those are 3-4 seconds that I can’t heal anybody else, since I need to be standing still to heal.
This, as you might guess, sucks ass. I hate — hate with a hot burning passion hate — being responsible for multiple wipes. The occasional “oops, fucked that one right up” is okay. But wiping on the same boss over and over because I can’t get out of the freaking goo fast enough just makes me angry, angry, angry.
Luckily, we finally got it, with some well timed bubbles so that I could avoid getting nailed, and Nick’s death-knight-healing abilities (tank AND healer. DK’s are OP…) and the rest of the instance was pie. Still, I think I’ll be avoiding the harder heroics until I get a better computer. Stupid computer.
Yeah. I’m getting a new computer soon.
I got the computer I’m using something like 2.5 years ago. It’s only in the past six months that I figured out that my pervasive graphics problems were due to my video card overheating. My solution is to direct several fans into my open case. Video cards are expensive. Heh.
Also, I just saw the Wrath Gate cinematic and am about to head back to Stormwind to piss off the recently returned king! ;-)