There is no particularly good way to make this long story short, so I’ll just be my usual terse self. For a variety of reasons, I am taking my leave of the internet and of computers in general for the next two weeks. I’ll have email – so no shenanigans! – but otherwise I’m going dark. Have fun, and do all the things I wouldn’t do!

Since this also happens to be post #100, you may feel free to treat it as an open thread. What’s on your mind?

I’m trying to get threaded comments and editable comments working nicely together. It’s not going well. If anyone has any suggestions, I welcome them.

In the meantime, here’s a comment topic for you, in honor of 3.3′s new Need Before Greed system: what’s your favorite piece of “wrong” gear – gear that’s not in your “optimal” armor class but that you can still wear, and that you prefer to wear over the available gear that is “optimal”?

A quick catcher-upper: in WOW 3.3, if there is an enchanter with a suitable skill level in the group, group members will be given three options when loot drops: Need, Greed, and Disenchant. Disenchant is a fancy way of saying “Greed, but I want the enchanting mats rather than the item”. If you click Disenchant, you are treated exactly as if you had rolled Greed, and roll along with the other people who rolled greed, but instead of Spellweaver’s Skullcap of the Skunk, you’ll get seventeen Infinite Dust in your bags. (That I initially typed “Arcane Dust” should tell you that I don’t deal with enchanting very often.)

This is being implemented because in WOW 3.3, you’ll be able to PUG with characters from other servers. This sounds awesome in theory, but in practice it’s limited because you can’t trade items to characters from other servers. That includes enchanting materials. So the common practice of letting the enchanter in the group roll Greed on the drops, and then disenchant at the end of the run and hand out the proceeds, won’t work if you have someone from another server in your group.

There are four main objections I have seen to this. They are:

• The game is using my tradeskill without my consent.

Well, no. The game is using your level of skill with a given profession to trigger a flag in the system; if the flag is triggered, the game does the disenchanting. You don’t have to do anything. Your profession isn’t being used. You’re just toggling a yes/no switch.

• Sometimes I don’t want to give my fellow party members enchanting mats, because they haven’t earned them.

I will be blunt: you are a douchebag who needs to put the game down and spend some time in social-acclimation classes. These folks come highly recommended.

• If anyone can generate enchanting mats, the market for them will go down.

You haven’t thought this through. Here’s how economics works: People roll Disenchant because the mats sell better than the gear itself. The supply of enchanting mats grows slightly (but not very much; as a rule, roughly the same amount of mats is going to be on the market – it’s just going to be coming from different people). The price drops. People roll Disenchant less because the mats aren’t selling as well. The market price stabilizes at slightly under the original rate.

So yes, instead of 100g for an Abyss Crystal you might get 95g. Forgive me for not feeling particularly sorry for you.

• If people can roll to disenchant, I should be able to roll to get the contents of mining nodes, herbs, and skinnable mobs.

Nope. 100% wrong. Here’s why: you can’t pick up a Saronite Vein and cart it back to a vendor to sell. End of story. Without an enchanter in the group, the gear’s still there to pick up and sell. Enchanters just make it easy to turn gear into mats; this is especially true of BOP gear, which – in the absence of an enchanter – can only be vendored.

Without a miner, that Saronite Vein might as well not even be there. Without an herbalist, every single Frost Lotus in the instance goes to utter waste. Without a skinner, those worgs will just lie there and rot.

The only valid comparison is suggesting that maybe cloth (Frostweave etc.) should have a Need/Greed/Bolt option, and if you want to suggest that, well, be my guest. I suspect that that and a dollar will get you a cup of coffee, but you’re welcome to try.

The bottom line is this: the Disenchant option is an unqualified positive addition to the game, and the people who are complaining about it either haven’t thought it through or probably shouldn’t be interacting with other human beings.

Just so we’re clear, spending hundreds of dollars buying booster packs of the TCG (or on eBay) to get a chance at a Spectral Tiger Cub is okay, but spending $10 at the Blizzard store to get a Pandaren Monk isn’t?

I just wanted to make sure we were all clear on that.

(For the record, I think it’s fine. It’s just not in my budget right now.)

There is a !meme going around the healing blogs. I have been instructed by Amber that I am to fill it out and post it here. Since I value the life of my Sinister Squashling, I obey:

• What is the name, class, and spec of your primary healer? Theande, Discipline Priest.
• What is your primary group healing environment? 25-player raids, though those are thin on the ground these days.
• What is your favorite healing spell for your class and why? Penance. It’s fast and has three chances to crit! Its only drawback is the extraordinarily long cooldown.
• What healing spell do you use least for your class and why? Desperate Prayer. The only reason I have it talented is because I had nowhere else I wanted to put the point.
• What do you feel is the biggest strength of your healing class and why? Mitigation. Discipline priests use a lot of shields! Preventing damage > healing it after the fact.
• What do you feel is the biggest weakness of your healing class and why? We don’t have any strong AOE heals, which limits our utility.
• In a 25 man raiding environment, what do you feel, in general, is the best healing assignment for you? Flex healing. Discipline priests do best when we’re going where we’re needed – we’re fast and light on our feet for a reason.
• What healing class do you enjoy healing with most and why? Probably holy priests, because we complement each other.
• What healing class do you enjoy healing with least and why? Resto druids. Their HOTs account for a lot of my overhealing.
• What is your worst habit as a healer? Using spare GCDs for DOTs instead of shielding…
• What is your biggest pet peeve in a group environment while healing? It’s a toss-up between tanks who drag whirlwinding mobs back into the casters and DPS who think the healer isn’t paying attention to the health meters.
• Do you feel that your class/spec is well balanced with other healers for PvE healing? Reasonably. It would feel more balanced if Blizzard included mitigation in the healing reporting.
• What tools do you use to evaluate your own performance as a healer? The logs posted by the raid leader afterward, mostly.
• What do you think is the biggest misconception people have about your healing class? Another toss-up, between “Disc is just for PVP” and “Disc is only good for tank healing”.
• What do you feel is the most difficult thing for new healers of your class to learn? That preventing someone’s health bar from going down is just as valuable as making it go back up.
• If someone were to try to evaluate your performance as a healer via recount, what sort of patterns would they see (i.e. lots of overhealing, low healing output, etc)? Moderate overhealing, lower healing than other healers because of all the time spent shielding.
• Haste or Crit and why? Haste. Discipline priests should be fast, getting heals to their targets almost as soon as the damage is taken – not slow and clunky and relying on big numbers and Divine Aegis.
• What healing class do you feel you understand least? Resto shamans.
• What add-ons or macros do you use, if any, to aid you in healing? I use Grid to keep track of health bars (although it’s falling out of favor with me) and FortExorcist to keep track of cooldowns.
• Do you strive primarily for balance between your healing stats, or do you stack some much higher than others, and why? I tend to stack Haste and Intellect; faster heals mean that I need more mana (and more regen). After that, spellpower, then crit, then anything else.

There, now my Squashling is safe.

I will not threaten their Sinister Squashlings (or any other pets), but those who must complete this or suffer the (kind of plush, actually) consequences are Shy and Tart.