Siha of Banana Shoulders has a good suggestion for how to Fix your UI in advance! I probably won’t take her advice – I find that addons change so much on those big patch days that you end up reconfiguring the whole thing anyway, but it’s worth thinking about.

Power Word: Totem’s Stages of my WoW career amused me because it’s so true. Fortunately I’ve been able to write off a couple of my Epic Fail Self Esteem Plummet Stages as “It was all new and I didn’t know any better, honest!”

I hate reading the official forums.   Read the forums for pretty much any class/spec you play and you’ll come away despondent at how underpowered you are.  With Wrath coming out and a lot of things changing, there’s also a lot of QQ going on on various blogs.  Here are some good things about QQ that I think about when it starts to get me down.

Someone cares!  Nobody QQs about how overpowered a party of 4 magic users is in Ultima III because no one cares.  The QQing is proof that there is a passionate community around WoW.  Otherwise the threads would look like this: "Rogues are OP!" …. <crickets>

There’s another side!  In a lot of QQ posts, counters are given.  Hunters may not be able to heal their parties but they bring a lot of other utility to counterbalance that.  There are strategies for dealing with stunlocking rogues or warlocks that chain fear you – read the QQ threads and you’ll find out how to deal with them.  A lot of stuff isn’t nearly so bad when you know both sides.

You’re not alone! The QQ threads show that you’re not alone with this problem.  Annoying as some problems are at least there are others out there who are seeing the same thing.

Broken things are being seen!  Sometimes stuff is just plain broken.  It may be there for balance reasons, it may be a bug, it may be an unintended side effect but if no one QQs, the developers won’t know that there’s a problem  There is hope that the problem may be fixed.

At the end of the day, I’d rather skip the QQ entirely but there are good things about it.

Larísa of The Pink Pigtail Inn has a post up: Are healers responsible and dps just having fun? The followup comments are great – be sure to read Saresa and Gevlon’s posts on the subject. Ulv’s ranking of the different roles on different scales is good stuff.

I still think that Rohan hit the nail on the head with his comment “…if DPS is working just as hard as healers are, why do so few of them roll healer alts?” When I’m feeling stressed and don’t want to deal with taking care of tender egos I shut down my chat boxes and play DPS. Healers and tanks are for group play and synergy (“We did it!”), DPS is for personal enjoyment (“I rock!”).

Tanks and healers have more pressure to keep the group going. Without a group, tanks and healers are lost. DPS has more pressure to perform individually. There’s lots of DPSers out there so DPS in a group has to defend their inclusion.

CRAZY IDEA What if all classes were DPS when not in a group, then within a group each would get the choice of the role they want to play? Have all the classes resemble druids – tank, healer, ranged DPS, melee DPS as needed. Would this inevitably lead to homogenization of classes?

I really hope that for Wrath the person or team that designed Netherstorm’s quests designs all the zones in Northrend.  Those who designed Blade’s Edge should be assigned to answering the phones.  Netherstorm has beautiful quest hubs and progression – do a bunch of quests in this part of the zone, then get sent on to the next part and so on.  Blade’s Edge has quests scattered all over the place and has you running back and forth through hostile territory repeatedly.  If you have a flying mount, Blade’s Edge isn’t terrible but if you’re leveling through it it’s a royal pain.  I skipped Blade’s Edge on my latest three 70s because I didn’t want the annoyance.